India’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for 2015 mandates child mortality to be cut down by two-thirds.A low rate of progress and a range of associated factors have nearly made it a tall order, virtually out of reach.Currently, the nation ranks even below some of the sub-Saharan nations with its population of underweight children among the highest in the world, reports the World Bank.
India accounts for nearly one-third of the poor in the world. Nearly one-fourth of its population -- over 400 million people -- are given to poverty and impoverishment. More than half of those (sixty percent) come from a group of seven states with the lowest income quintile.
Furthermore, one-third of the new-borns are weak and fall below optimal birth weight. About forty-three percent of the children under the age of five are underweight, forty-eight percent stunted, nearly seventy percent highly prone to be anaemic, and over fifty percent exhibit a lack of Vitamin A.
In 2001, the Supreme Court mandated in a statutory ruling that the ‘Right to Food’ be implemented as one of the fundamental citizen rights. That brought immediate legal binding to the nutrition-intensive schemes running at that time. The central government further announced, in 2005, the enactment of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to aid the unemployed poor.
The most current of all malnutrition reforms has been the National Food Security Bill, which aims at providing highly subsidized food grains to nearly seventy percent of the population, passed by the Parliament in 2013. Even with a host of reforms, and a central Integrated Child Development System (ICDS) in place, the malnutrition rate in the country still exhibits an extremely high percentage, with children affected the most.
The problem, as observed by the Ponty Chadha Foundation and other institutions dedicated to the cause, does not lie in shortage of food, but in a lack of adequate means of supply. The Foundation also observes that government and other beneficiary schemes get scuttled because the benefits do not reach the intended target.
Taking strong view of this particular concern, the Foundation has started off a campaign to set up food banks across the country. These banks directly reach the poor with nutrition-intensive supplies procured from government charities, NGOs, and subsidiary associates of the Ponty Chadha Foundation.
The pilot trial in Noida and Ghaziabad itself has earned the backing of the India FoodBanking Network (IFBN), and the underlying aim is to take the program further into the country.
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