Lucknow: Rae Bareli, the constituency of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has ranked third in the list of districts with most nutritionally deprived children in the country.
According to the findings listed in the Annual Health Survey Report on Clinical Anthropometric and Biochemical Survey released recently by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Rae Bareli has the most nutritionally deprived in the state. It is only behind Jamui and Munger districts of Bihar, which occupy the first two slots in the list.
The survey covered 274 districts and was based on a parameter called child nutritional deprivation index (CNDI), which is a summary measure of nutritional deprivation in children assessed on the basis of malnutrition data. On the list of the “worst 100”, 40 districts were from UP.
The key dimensions for the assessment of malnutrition include stunting (low height for age), wasting (low weight for height), being underweight and anaemia.
Prof. Shaily Awasthi of department of paediatrics in the King George’s Medical University, who has worked on a number of projects in Rae Bareli, said, “The findings reaffirm gaps in the state’s health service delivery system. CNDI was found high in districts with a large number of babies with low birth weight. Districts where a majority of children were breastfed within the first hour of birth did better and reported a low CNDI”.
Interestingly, the report pin-pointed two reasons for the trend: low birth weight and lack of breast-feeding in the first hour of birth.
Every second child born in India weighs below normal at birth while the rate of breast-feeding in the first hour is about 50 per cent, reveals health ministry.
