Click to play videoNew Delhi: India's children are dying of hunger. One in every 3 Indian kids is malnourished. The prime minister has called this finding a national shame.
While releasing the first-ever Citizens' Hunger Report in the capital on Tuesday, the PM said only one in five Indian children had acceptable levels of nutrition.
"The problem of malnutrition is a national shame. Despite growth in the GDP, the level of under-nutrition in our country is unacceptably high. We've also not succeeded ion reducing this rate fast enough," he said.
Malnutrition stalks 73 thousand households in 112 districts in 7 states. Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh is one of the worst affected tribal areas in the state. CNN-BN met four-year-old Deepu who suffers from severe malnutrition. The boy has little chances of survival.
For months, the boy has been too weak and too ill to respond to his parents who say they are just watching him die.
Said Jabru, Deepu’s father, "The main problem is that we do not know what to do. I do not know what the government is doing. I'm a labourer. How would I know?"
Far away in Raichur, Karnataka, CNN-IBN met 14-year-old Nagaraju who is in shocking condition. His sunken cheekbones and stick-like limbs show that Nagaraju has hardly ever seen 2 square meals a day.
Parvathy, Nagaraju's mother, said, "We don’t understand his illness and we have no more money to spend on him."
A few days later, Nagaraju passed away, becoming yet another statistic in Raichur, where hunger deaths are chronic.
In Melghat, just 4 hours from Mumbai, stays Sitaram who struggles to feed his family. His son Ritesh is 6, but he is so malnourished and stunted that he looks no more than 3.
Says Sitaram, "I have taken my boy everywhere, to every hospital. But I have no idea what is wrong. He just looks like a stick."
Gulnaz was an year old when CNN-IBN met her last year. Weighing just 5 kg at the age of 1, the girl was severely malnourished according to WHO standards.
Today all that remains of her is an entry in a death register. She died earlier this year as her hunger pangs went unheard.
Gulnaz's mother, Asma, said, "She never opened her eyes the day she died. Just for once she opened them to look at me and died immediately after."
Across the nation, the stories vary from systemic apathy to government schemes that don’t work. From the absence of doctors to the absence of infrastructure, it’s the nation’s children who are paying - with their lives.
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