Indian states have seen some improvements in child nutrition over the last decade, but the first official data of a decade shows that one in three children is still stunted.

Childhood stunting effects a massive percentage of the world’s youth. UNICEF estimates that some 39% of children in the developing world are stunted. 40% of children in sub-Saharan Africa are stunted and in East and South Asia, estimates climb as high as 50% of children. The numbers tally in at 209 million stunted children in the developing world.

As Childhood stunting is a condition that is defined as height for age below the fifth percentile on a reference growth curve. If, within a given population, substantially more than 5% of an identified child population have heights that are lower than the curve, then it is likely that said population would have a higher-than-expected prevalence of stunting. It measures the nutritional status of children. It is an important indicator of the prevalence of malnutrition or other nutrition-related disorders among an identified population in a given region or area.

Aside from inadequate nutrition, there are several other causes of childhood stunting. These include: chronic or recurrent infections, intestinal parasites, low birth weight, and in rare cases, extreme psychosocial stress without nutritional deficiencies. Several of these factors are influenced by each other. Low birth weight is correlated with nutritional deficiencies, and inadequate nutrition is correlated to chronic or recurrent infections.

As India had 62 million stunted children, accounting for a third of the world’s burden of stunting ( according to 2005-06 data). India’s official source of nutrition data – key to measure stunting, wasting and other indicators of acute malnutrition – is the National Family Health Survey whose fourth round was conducted in 2014-15 after delays and disagreements that took ten years to resolve. As a result, India has had no official data on whether its high economic growth since 2005-6 improved nutritional outcomes.

‘37% children under age 5 stunted’

The new NFHS-4 data for 15 states shows that 37 per cent of children under the age of five in these states is stunted, a fall of just five percentage points in a decade. Bihar and Madhya Pradesh are the worst off, with 48 and 42 per cent respectively of children stunted. The proportion of underweight children has reduced equally slowly, from 39 per cent to 34 per cent, with Bihar and Madhya Pradesh the worst off again.

The one success has been in the area of child wasting (low weight for height). The states for which data is available have more than halved their proportion of wasted children in the last decade, from 48 per cent to 22 per cent, the new data shows. The proportions of adult men and women with below normal Body Mass Index have also declined.

Health ministry officials cautioned that the data released so far covers only half the country and does not include high-performing states in the north-east, Kerala and Maharashtra.

India has also failed to make progress on reducing anaemia. The proportion of anaemic children aged 6 to 59 months fell just five percentage points to 61% in 2014, and over half of women aged 15-49 are still anaemic. Of all men aged 15-49, a quarter are suffering from anaemia, as was in 2004. Haryana has the highest proportion of anaemic children (72 per cent) and women (63 per cent) while in Bihar and Meghalaya, one in three men are anaemic, the highest in the country.

A smaller sample survey commissioned in 2012-13 and conducted with UNICEF – the Rapid Survey on Children – was also released only in 2015. It showed a ten percentage point decline in the proportion of children under the age of five who were stunted (shorter than expected for their ages) and a 13 percentage point decline in the proportion of children who were underweight (lower weights than expected for their age).