Opinion - Letters to the Editor

On malnutrition

The well articulated analysis of child malnutrition in India (June 22) has rightly concluded that linkages of child malnutrition with women’s health and well-being are strong. As for the contention that the focus should shift from enhancing incomes and food availability to understanding how members of a household establish command over food, health and care, I have found from my experience that it is only in families with reasonably good incomes that women suffer because of discriminatory cultural practices. In families that do not have sufficient income to meet the minimum food requirements, women become victims of economic conditions rather than discriminatory practices.

In some backward villages of Bethul district in Madhya Pradesh, I found that a number of maternal deaths occurred due to lack of pre-natal and post-natal care. Pregnant women were compelled to work at low wages even during the advanced stage of pregnancy. A few days after delivery, they had to go to work again. The villages where these women lived were 10-12 km away from the primary health centre and were not connected with all weather roads.

To improve the health status of women, village panchayats should register all cases of pregnancy. A mobile medical unit should visit them for pre-natal and post-natal check ups. Secondly, a pregnant woman should be given cereal food equivalent to her wage for three months. She should not be allowed to work for these three months — one-and-a-half months before and after delivery. Such minimum social security measures will go a long way in helping women.

Arun Kumar Ghosh,
New Delhi

Two factors govern a common man’s diet in India. The first is misconception about nutrition. A lot of us associate nutrition with costly food. Most of our cooking processes drain the food of essential nutrients. The food is mainly carbohydrate rich and protein deficient.

The second factor is the failure of the public distribution system. Basic food commodities are becoming costlier and out of the reach of the common man. To complicate matters, the new fad of having processed food threatens to push traditional foods, which are quite nutritious, into oblivion.

The double burden of a large proportion of undernourished and a slow but certainly rising population of the obese threatens to hold our ill-equipped public health system to ransom in the days to come.

Jeevan Kuruvilla,
Vellore

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