Terming India's nutrition policy half-baked, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), says that the country can provide nutrition security to its population only by 2043.

“Countries such as China, Thailand, and Brazil have taken bold actions to successfully accelerate reductions in undernutrition and are on track to reach the first millennium development goals (MDGs) on target, by the year 2015. But India will do so only in 2043 with its present pace of actions,” says a recently prepared policy note by the IFPRI, an international think-tank on agriculture.

The note also mentions, “Undernutrition continues to exert a physical, cognitive, and economic toll, costing India as much as three percent of its GDP per year.”

IFPRI says that India has not made nutrition interventions effective at the ground level despite having schemes like health and nutrition programmes or schemes, such as the Integrated Child Development Scheme, Mid-Day Meals, Reproductive and Child Health Programme, and National Rural Health Mission.

The policy note said that even if India does direct nutrition interventions and scales-up implementation effectively, it will address only one-third of India’s undernutrition burden.

“India must also scale up its investments in integrated data systems (including health, nutrition, economic, and livelihoods) at regular intervals for diagnostics, problem solving, and tracking progress. Ignoring the agriculture–nutrition pathways in India will have enormous economic and social costs,” the note held.

However, the think-tank calls for streamlining India’s agriculture sector. “It can maximise the potential of existing architectures across sectors to make them more pro-nutrition oriented and to promote meaningful coherence and convergence across sectors.”

According to NFHS data 2005-06, “Almost one in two Indian children is stunted and 40 percent are underweight. One-third of all Indian women are underweight. Rates of micronutrient deficiencies are extremely high, with almost 80 percent of children and 56 percent of women being anemic.”