Interrogating Progress in Addressing Malnutrition in India

Malnutrition in India has been a persistent problem and has even been called a ‘national shame’. This has been one aspect of the Indian economy that regularly reminds us during both periods of high economic growth as well as stagnation, that the ‘development’ being experienced is lop-sided. India consistently ranks below what is expected based on its per capita income level in various global indices of hunger, malnutrition and food security. While the literature in the 1990s referred to this problem as the ‘Asian enigma’ (Ramalingaswami, Jonsson and Rhode 1997), to reflect the worse malnutrition outcomes in south Asian countries compared to poorer countries in Africa, in more recent times we are observing what seems an ‘Indian enigma’ (Drèze and Sen, 2020), with neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh breaking out of this trend while India continues to lag.