Child Malnutrition and Gender Discrimination in South Asia

Abstract

Half of the world’s malnourished children are to be found in just three countries – Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. There could be no greater irony than the fact that of the seven declared nuclear states in the world, two – India and Pakistan – account for more undernourished children than any other country in the world in absolute terms. In fact, the child malnutrition rates in India and Pakistan are also much higher than in sub-Saharan Africa on average. We explore these paradoxes in this paper. The paper begins with a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of child malnutrition (Section I). Section II presents the nutritional status of children in a cross-regional perspective, and finds that south Asia has the worst child malnutrition rates in the world. Section III discusses the determinants of these malnutrition rates in south Asia in the light of the conceptual discussion above. It focuses especially on India since the country has the world’s largest number of malnourished children. The final section goes on to draw some brief policy implications.