Malnutrition in India

Someone famously said that in India for whatever is true, the opposite is also true. However, in certain cases, truths simply don't have opposites. Every once in a while, I learn something about the people of the nation that leaves me convinced that the popular mainstream narrative about India's 'success' leaves much to be desired. The country has grown at at least 7% or more for almost all of the past decade, and that is approximately the amount of time that it takes an economy to double at that growth rate.

Yet, according to World Bank estimates, 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). The Planning Commission puts the figure at 27.5% (2005), an improvement from 36% (1994) a decade earlier.

This means that the collective income of 27% of India i.e. 300 million people (about the population of the U.S.) in 2005 was less than $137 billion (PPP). In the years between 2000 and 2004 alone, the economy expanded by $1228 billion. Hence, if these 300 million people had started with $137 billion in 2000, and had received 1/9 (11 %) of the $1228 billion increase in income, then their collective income could have doubled!

Even those who are aware of these figures, and have grown up in pockets of relative economic stability surrounded by urban poverty (like myself), the face of abject rural poverty is one they have only seen in films, read in books, or caught fleeting glimpses of in real life. If Bangalore is the flagship of India's 'success,' then the body, hearts, and souls in this New York Times Slideshow, are certainly emblematic of the nation's collective 'failure.'

Attached below is a graph of the rate of poverty alleviation in India over the past 30 years as calculated by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation. And here is the link to the NYTimes article that accompanied the slideshow.