About

• The report has been prepared by World Vision India, one of the largest child-focused humanitarian organisations and IFMR LEAD, a research organisation based in India. They used the most recent data available to take a holistic look at child well-being.
• The researchers used a total of 24 indicators to create the score instead of just considering income poverty. The 24 indicators are divided into three categories: Healthy individual development, positive relationships and protective contexts.
• The report is important considering that 40 per cent of the country’s population is made of children between the ages of 1 and 18.

Key Findings

• Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh leading the charts among the states and Meghalaya, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh featuring at the bottom.
• The data shows that even states that are performing best in overall child well-being, are not doing so well in indicators of health.
• For instance, though Tamil Nadu is the second-best performer in the overall category, with a score of 0.67, it slips to to the fifth position when it comes to health indicators. Kerala, leading with a score of 0.76 and Himachal Pradesh, which is in third place with a score of 0.67, are not much better.
• West Bengal that is eleventh in overall performance, does better in health indicators and ranks seventh.
• Similarly, Andhra Pradesh which performs poorly in the overall index and is at the 26th position, does well in health and goes up to the twelfth position.
• Among the union territories, Puducherry leads the way, with a score of 0.77 and Dadra and Nagar Haveli features at the other end, with a score of 0.52.
• Meghalaya (0.53), Jharkhand (0.50) and Madhya Pradesh (0.44) feature at the bottom in the overall index.

Health status of India's children (Global nutrition report)

• Stunting in children under five years of age is declining at a global level but numbers in Africa are increasing.
• Although, some progress is visible only against stunting, India still holds almost a third of the world's burden for stunting. Of the three countries that are home to almost half (47.2%) of all stunted children, two are in Asia, with India having 46.6 million (31%) and Pakistan having 10.7 million.
• India also accounted for 25.5 million children who are wasted, followed by Nigeria (3.4 million) and Indonesia (3.3 million). More than half of the world's children impacted by wasting (26.9 million) live in South Asia.
• Progress in addressing underweight and anaemia among women has been extremely slow while overweight ((body mass index (BMI ≥25) and obesity (BMI ≥30) among adults is getting worse, with higher rates of obesity among womenthan men. Conversely, diabetes is more common among men than women.
• India also figures among the set of countries that has more than a million overweight children. The other nations are China, Indonesia, India, Egypt, US, Brazil and Pakistan.
• Different forms of malnutrition continue to coexist with each other. Of the 141 countries analysed, 88% experience more than one form of malnutrition.
• In situations of crises arising from conflict, fragility, violence and environmental change there is an urgent need to treat and prevent multiple burdens of malnutrition while also building nutrition resilience.

Recommendations

• Break down silos between malnutrition in all its forms- Different forms of malnutrition coexist which are being tackled at different rates, vary between populations, and overlap with each other in various ways. Therefore they require integrated approaches and cohesive work to address them.
• Prioritise and invest in the data and capacity to use them- The efforts made to improve the collection and analysis of diet data must continue, and the gap in micronutrient data must be addressed as a matter of urgency. However, data collection and analysis is not enough, all stakeholders also need the capacity to use it to make evidence-based decisions.
• Increase financing for nutrition-  Although nutrition financing have increased over the years, especially in developing countries, they are not adequate. Building on this progress, domestic investments must continue to grow and international aid donors must keep investing.
• Galvanise action on healthy diets- Governments and business need to implement a holistic package of actions to ensure food systems and food environments are delivering healthy diets that are affordable, accessible and desirable for all.