We are a country of 1.2 billion people, 15% of the world’s population. But we have so far won just 3 medals at the London Olympics – 0.5% of the total medals won by all countries together — and languish at the 44th spot in the medals tally, behind countries like Cuba (population of 11 million), Jamaica (2.7 million), Kenya and Ethiopia.
Once the Olympics is over and we get over the momentary euphoria generated by each of those handful of medals, there will be lots of people who will once again bash our sporting bodies for being poorly managed, blame our spends on sports, and criticize how we treat our sports stars (barring the cricket players). And we’ll gloss over the one thing that requires the biggest attention to improve our collective sporting capability: malnutrition.
Sporting achievements need people who are physically fit. And despite all the economic growth of the last two decades, we remain the world’s most malnourished country. The Hunger and Malnutrition (Hungama) survey released by the Prime Minister in January this year showed that 42% of Indian children below five years of age are underweight, almost double the rate in sub-Saharan Africa. The Unicef says that one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. Aound 46% of all children below the age of three are too small for their age, 47% are underweight and at least 16% “are wasted”. Many of these children, Unicef says, are severely malnourished. This does not mean that the remaining 50 odd percent children are well nourished. Far from it; most aren’t. And as for the few rich and well nourished, they would rather head towards an engineering or management school, certainly not sports.
Malnutrition damages cognitive and physical development and weakens the immune system, making people more susceptible to disease. The first 1,000 days, from conception, of a child’s life is the most critical. If the foetus does not get enough nutrition from the mother because the mother is undernourished, it leads to underweight babies, leading in turn to stunted adults. And given the levels of income in our country and the absence of any mass healthcare and nutrition programmes, most mothers are indeed undernourished.
And it’s amazing how callous the Indian government has been towards the issue. In 2009, the United Nations began an initiative called the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement. SUN was a global push for action and investment to improve maternal and child nutrition. SUN helps governments, civil society, businesses, development agencies, international organizations and foundations to synergize their support to communities as they reduce malnutrition – and demonstrate their results. “By integrating solutions across sectors and creating new partnerships, SUN creates sustainable change and tangible results that no one programme, organization, business or government could achieve alone,” the UN says.
Twenty-seven countries have chosen to join the SUN movement so far, but the country with the most malnourished – India – is still not a signatory to it.
Earlier this year, a panel of economists including four Nobel laureates sat down to identify the smartest ways to allocate money to respond to ten of the world’s biggest challenges. The Copenhagen Consensus 2012 Expert Panel, as it was called, found that fighting malnourishment should be the top priority for policy-makers and philanthropists. Nobel laureate economist Vernon Smith said: “One of the most compelling investments is to get nutrients to the world’s undernourished. The benefits from doing so – in terms of increased health, schooling, and productivity – are tremendous.”
“It is not Greece, it is not the exchange rate, not what is happening in the United States. The best brains in the world are identifying malnutrition as the No. 1 problem,” Vinita Bali recently told us. Bali, the managing director of Britannia Industries, is among 27 global leaders appointed by the United Nations earlier this year to guide the implementation of the SUN framework in the countries that are signatories to it.
Obviously India will not be amongst them. And till such time it takes the matter of malnutrition seriously, we will remain pretty much at the bottom of the Olympics medals heap.