One in every two children in West Bengal is anaemic, NFHS reveals

In a series of revelations, the nutritional status of children in West Bengal is found to have improved only marginally, in comparison to that of the previous NFHS data published almost a decade ago.

Besides child malnutrition, quality of ante-natal and delivery care for expecting mothers also show worrying trends negatively impacting child-health in the state, as findings of the recent survey suggest.

However, overall findings of the first phase of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) for 2015-16 show marginal improvements in the maternal and child health and nutrition across 13 States and two UTs.

Even though West Bengal has done fairly well in several child health and nutrition indicators like immunisation and treatment of critical childhood diseases, the progression rate of critical indicators like child nutrition, which has direct linkage with children’s overall growth and development remains far below than expectation.

Atindra Nath Das, Regional Director (East), CRY – Child Rights and You, said, “The NFHS is not just a reflection of the state of health and nutritional well being of children but it also provides the direction for corrective measures in state policies and programmes. For West Bengal, the data so released reinforces the need for the state to address nutritional security of children and expecting mothers as an emergency.”

“In the context of malnutrition, strengthening of Anganwadi Centres and a robust system of growth monitoring, becomes imperative,” he said.

NFHS findings gives three sets of data as child malnutrition indicators – stunting (low height for age), wasting (low weight for height) and underweight (low weight for age). While the percentage of stunted children in West Bengal has decreased by only 12% over the last decade (from 44.6% in 2005-‘06 to 32.5% in 2015-‘16), percentage of wasted and severely wasted children actually increased by almost 4% (from 16.9% to 20.3%) and 2% (from 4.5% to 6.5%) over the same period of time. More worrying is the fact that of all children in West Bengal one in every three (31.5) is still underweight. This percentage was 38.7 in 2005-‘06).

As per recent NFHS findings, Anaemia in children is found to have decreased marginally across most of the states, but still remains worryingly widespread. In West Bengal, though the number of children under 5 years suffering from Anaemia decreased by 7 percentage points over the last decade (from 61% in 2005-‘06 to 54.2% in 2015-’16), one in every two children is still Anaemic. Mothers do not fare any better than children in this regard either, as more than 60% of all women and 53.2% of pregnant women are found Anaemic in West Bengal, the survey revealed.

The poor status of consumption of Iron & Folic Acid (IFA) supplementation and lack of proper ante-natal care for expecting mothers are also areas of concern, as the findings reveal. Only 28.1% of mothers consumed Iron-Folic during pregnancy, and only 21.8% of them had full ante-natal care. These data suggest that in West Bengal quality maternity care is still a distant cry. Also average Out Of Pocket Expenditure (OOPE) per delivery in public health facilities stands at Rs. 7,782 in West Bengal, which is remarkably high in comparison to that of other states. 

Data also reveal that 9 out of 11 states have not been able to reduce the Infant mortality rate even by 2 percentage points annually. As per the analysis of critical child health indicators of NFHS 4 done by CRY, the only two states that have been able to sustain a pace of annual reduction in IMR by two points are West Bengal and Tripura. Currently in India 40 out of 1000 infants don’t get celebrate their first birthday.

The much-awaited survey on India’s health indicators was released by the Health Ministry recently, after almost a decade. While the report provides an improvement in the overall health of children over, the rate of progression on annual basis is alarming.

The status of nutrition for children under five shows marginal improvement. While both the proportion of underweight and stunted (low height for age) children has seen a decline, the proportion of wasted children has increased in 6 of the 11 states (West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Karnataka, Goa and Sikkim).

Mission Indradhanush, the national initiative of the India aims to achieve cent percent full immunization, which seems to be a distant dream in light of the status of immunization revealed by NFHS. In 8 out of 11 states (Tamil Nadu, Haryana, UT, Tripura, Karnataka, Goa, MP, Sikkim) of the country one out of 3 children do not receive full immunization. Further analysis shows that these states have failed to increase their immunization coverage even by 2 percent per year.

The first phase of the survey included Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Goa, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand, West Bengal and two Union Territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry.