New Delhi, March 12 The Union Women and Child Development Ministry on Tuesday rebutted a recently published article on the "zero food children" in India and termed it a deliberate and malicious attempt by interested lobbies to sensationalize fake news.
The article, published on February 12 on the JAMA Network, claimed that the prevalence of malnourished children in India who haven't eaten anything in 24 hours (also known as 'zero-food' children) is comparable to the prevalence rates in West African nations like Guinea, Benin, Liberia and Mali.
The ministry in a statement said that it is surprising that no primary research has been conducted by S.V. Subramanian and co-authors in the study to arrive at such broad and incorrect generalizations on the nutritional status of children in India.
"The authors themselves have admitted to deep misgivings on the data and have referred to at least 9 limitations which make their study absolutely unreliable. There is no scientific definition of 'zero food children'," it added.
The ministry further said that the methodology followed is opaque and has attempted to interpret single-day recalls by those who were supposedly contacted. No state government or any private organization in India has ever reported about starving children.
"The JAMA article does not acknowledge the importance of breast milk for infants who are more than six months old and has instead looked at only the feeding of such infants with animal milk/formula, solids or semi-solids etc. It is surprising that the article excludes breast milk from the definition of food for infants who are six to twenty-three months old. Out of the so-called 19.3 per cent Zero Food Children referred to by the study, 17.8 per cent had received breast milk and only 1.5 per cent children have been claimed as non-breast fed," the ministry asserted.
The ministry pointed out that the study has not referred to the publicly available data of more than eight crore children measured month after month on nutritional indicators on the Poshan Tracker through the 13.9 lakh Anganwadi Centres (AWCs) across the country.
"Neither has any attempt been made by the authors to seek clarification from public authorities. It is therefore evident that this article is maliciously timed to be politically provocative," it said.
According to the ministry, out of approximately 13.7 crore children in the age group of 6 months to 6 years in India, 8.9 crore are registered at Anganwadi Centres and 95 per cent of them are Aadhaar verified on the Poshan Tracker. As per data of the Poshan Tracker, only about 6.26 per cent are found to be wasted and only 1.9 per cent are severely malnourished.
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