ABSTRACT
High economic growth in India in the last two decades has unfortunately not been translated into satisfactory progress on reducing hunger and malnutrition. The existing response to malnutrition in India has been skewed towards food-based interventions and has placed little emphasis on schemes addressing the determinants of malnutrition. In addition to general problems of governance and delivery that affect all programmes, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), the main programme to address malnutrition, is particularly doing quite poorly. Although bringing strong nutrition focus in health programmes is one of the objectives of ICDS, the health sector itself suffers from several deficiencies. Economic growth alone is insufficient to bring about significant reductions in the prevalence of malnourishment among children, or improvement in health of the poor. Without a major shake-up in policy and an improvement in design of the ICDS as well as in the effectiveness of its implementation, the attainment of the goal of fast reduction in HUNGaMA looks unlikely.
