Centre to launch health census from March 20

To find out the total number of obese, malnourished and severely malnourished children across the country, the Centre is soon launching a health census. The week-long drive will be undertaken by the women and child development ministry from March 20 to 28.

Senior officials of the WCD ministry told DH that the government will launch the drive in specialised camps with the help of NGOs and government institutions.

To be sure, Anganwadi across the country track the health parameters of children, by recording their height, weight and mid-upper arm circumference, among other parameters. The data is collected and stored in the Poshan Tracker system. Ministry officials, however, said that with the new drive the government wants to reach out to children in private schools, too.

“Till now, we do not have exact numbers on how many obese children there are in the country. There are numbers for malnourished children that need updating,” said the official. The ministry hopes to make this a yearly drive.

As part of the drive, the ministry will launch a competition of sorts, and users will be allowed to key in the data themselves.

The ministry has supplementary nutrition facilities as part of its Integrated Child Development Scheme for children in anganwadis, and they are divided into normal, malnourished and severely malnourished categories. The government defines severely malnourished children as those with a “very low” weight-for-height score, which is below - 3. Symptoms like visible severe wasting and the presence of nutritional oedema are taken into account as well.

NFHS-5 data states that in India, the number of children under five years who are stunted is 35.5% and while 32.1% of the children in the age group are underweight. NFHS-5 also states that 7.7% of Indian children under five are severely wasted. In addition, over 3.4% of children under five are obese in India as per the NFHS-5.

In a reply to the Parliament in July last year, the government said that there are around 9.27 lakh severely acutely malnourished children between the age of six months and six years in India till November 2020. In an RTI response to news agency PTI in November last year, the WCD ministry said that there were 17,76,902 severely acutely malnourished children and 15,46,420 moderately acute malnourished children in the country as of October 14, 2021.

With 6,16,772 malnourished children, Maharashtra had the highest, followed by Bihar with 4,75,824 children, Gujarat with 3,20,465 children, Andhra Pradesh with 2,67,228 children, and Karnataka with 2,49,463 children.

The ministry had written to the food and consumer affairs ministry last week to curd ads of junk foods to restrict obesity. However, officials said that the data drive was not connected to this.

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