National family Health survey - India

Though I believe statistics dont necessarily show the true picture - because means and averages(and other measures) remove the sense of effect on the most suffering groups - these statistics are pretty bad even when discounting the above fact. Not that I have seen them first time but each time you see them they somehow get more and more shocking. Though some things show that problems are not unsolvable - there seems to be high correlation between education of women and their age of marriage, fertility rates, time of their first child (other factors also do contribute to that but still relationship is strong). At the same time two factors malnutrition and gender bias (especially in terms of nutrition for women compared to men) are very strong and disheartening. I think there is no use in "Right to Education" if we still have such high percentage of underweight/malnourished kids and that too in formative years.

Now on some absolute terms India has made some improvements reduced malnutrituion by 2% or so, but over 56.2 per cent married women in the age group between 15 and 49 were anaemic in 2006 as against 51.8 per cent in 1999. Its an absolute increase of almost 5%.
More so: 79.1 per cent of children between the ages of three to six years were anaemic in 2006 as against 74.2 per cent in 1999.

Also these are India wide numbers - there are a whole set of disparities within India at State levels and even within States, so in short the picture can look worse than what these numbers show in some areas. You can take a look at particular states here: http://www.nfhsindia.org/factsheet.html


The India wide fact sheet is here: http://www.nfhsindia.org/pdf/IN.pdf

Some tit-bits which show logic doesnt necessarily work:

1. In our rich states: " While the immunisation cover has dropped by 19.6% in Maharashtra, a decline of 12.7% has been noted in the case of Andhra and 12% in Punjab."

2. Though Media gives us a picture that Ethopia is poor, its atleast better than India (which is among fastest growing and middle income country):
Indian Children Suffer More Malnutrition than in Ethiopia

And Indian economy is referred to as developing at an average rate of >6% over last five years? Really?.

News stories related to this:
http://www.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1113811383