Re: Is India a failed State? or India is a failed State?
**Malnutrition: India beats sub-Saharan Africa
India has the highest number of malnourished children in the world, with Madhya Pradesh being the worst-affected state. About 47% of under-fives, numbering 57 million are underweight. Even sub-Saharan Africa is better off, where 33% of the children are malnourished. **These shocking figures have been revealed in Unicef’s Progress for Children: A Report Card on Nutrition, released globally on Tuesday. The worst-affected states in India are UP, Rajasthan, Orissa, Bihar and Maharastra. Over 50% of children in some of these states are malnourished. However, some Indian states maintaining high rates of nourishment among children include Goa, Kerala, Mizoram and Tamil Nadu. The report says 27% of children in South Asian countries - around 146 million - are to be underweight, many to a life-threatening degree. More than half these children live in just three countries - Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
And the reason for South Asia’s pitiful performance - poor food quality, low social status of women and early marriage leading to low birth weight, bad quality hygiene and high rate of illiteracy. Speaking exclusively to TOI, a day before the release of the India section of the report card, Unicef India’s chief of child development and nutrition programme, Werner Schultink, said no other country was worse off than India in the case of malnourished children. “The causes for this are many: bad quality feeding, population density, high rate of infectious diseases, high rate of illiteracy among women, high prevalence of gender inequality, low rate of immunisation and high rate of birth of underweight babies,” he said. Schultink said it the fact that malnutrition had fallen from 70% in 1970s to 47% now is testimony to India’s commitment. He added that policymakers must realise that it does not take complicated interventions to make an important impact. All they have to do is ensure mothers feed newborns on breast milk for six months from birth, reduce infectious diseases, specially diarrhoea and malaria, counsel mothers on better infant care.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/a…47,curpg-1.cms
Billy
Your link did not work for me. However you I find many of the times your data is inaccurate. Here is what I found on the UNICEF web site and your report comparing India with Africa is somewhat hard to believe. Get into the UNICEF web site and try to generate the data. I did it for comparison and see the results
Under-5 mortality rate (2004)
China 31
Infant mortality rate (under 1) (2004)
China 26
Total adult literacy rate (2000-2004*)
China 91
http://www.unicef.org/view_chart.php?sid=a6cac91c0fa9cb463acbabb1229620d2&create_chart=Create+Table+>>&submit_to_chart=1&layout=1&language=eng
else try this link and generate your own graph:
http://www.unicef.org/statistics/index_step2.php ?