Joint Malnutrition Estimate: India sees reduction in stunting; but wasting, obesity are concerns: report

Source: The post is based on the article “India sees reduction in stunting; but wasting, obesity are concerns: report” published in The Hindu on 29th May 2023

What is the News?

Recently, a Joint Malnutrition Estimate was released by the UNICEF, the WHO and the World Bank.

What are the key concerns highlighted by the Joint Malnutrition Estimate?

The world has shown insufficient progress to reach the 2025 World Health Assembly global nutrition targets and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 targets.

Only about one-third of all countries are ‘on track’ to halve the number of children affected by stunting by 2030. Even fewer countries are expected to achieve the 2030 target of 3% prevalence for overweight.

What are the key findings of Joint Malnutrition Estimate?

Stunting: India continues to show a reduction in stunting and recorded 1.6 crore fewer stunted children under five years in 2022 than in 2012.

Stunting among children under five years in India dropped from a prevalence rate of 41.6% in 2012 to 31.7% in 2022.

India’s share of the global burden of stunting also declined from 30% to 25% in the past decade.

Note: Globally, stunting declined from a prevalence rate of 26.3% in 2012 to 22.3% in 2022.

Wasting: The overall prevalence of wasting in 2022 was 18.7% in India, with a share of 49% in the global burden.

Obesity: The prevalence of obesity marginally increased in a decade from 2.2% in 2012 to 2.8% in 2022, thereby contributing to 8.8% of the global share.

Note: The overall classification for obesity is low and much lower than the global prevalence of 5.6%.

Does the global report is in sync with national findings?

The decline in stunting in India is commensurate with National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 (2019-2021) data which estimated its prevalence at 35.5% as against 38% in NFHS-4 (2016) and 48% in NFHS-3 (2006).

The NFHS also highlighted that almost two-thirds of children at 12 or 24 months had wasting at birth or at one month of age. This means two-thirds of the wasting is caused by maternal malnutrition.