Hunger to health: India's journey towards food and nutritional security

In India with a five-fold increase in food grain production from 50 million tons in 1950-51 to about 250 million tons in 2014-15, India has moved away from dependence on food aid to become a net food exporter. In 2016, the government launched a few programs to double farmers' incomes by 2022. These seek to remove bottlenecks for greater agricultural productivity, especially in rain-fed areas. India shares a quarter of the global hunger burden, nearly 195 million undernourished people. India has made rapid strides in improving rates of under and malnutrition. Between 2006 and 2016, stunting in children below five years declined from 48per cent to 38 per cent. Yet, India continues to have one of the world's highest child undernutrition rates, impacting the child's health and development, performance in school and productivity in adult life. Nearly 47 million or 4 out of ten children in India are not meeting their full human potential because of chronic undernutrition or stunting. Stunting has consequences such as diminished learning capacity, poor school performance, reduced earnings and increased risks of chronic diseases. The impacts are multi-generational as malnourished girls and women often give birth to low birth-weight infants. There has also been an increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents in India, which has life-long consequences of non-communicable diseases in adulthood. The government has large food security and anti-poverty programs but there are critical gaps in terms of inclusion and exclusion errors. Women and girls are particularly disadvantaged. Despite the achievement of national food self-sufficiency, new challenges have emerged: Slowing agriculture growth, climate change, land degradation and shrinking bio-diversity. Large tracts of farmlands in India have become barren due to imbalanced fertilizer use and excessive use of a fertilizer, urea.