Beneath a nation's proud claims of having fulfilled its food needs, it suggests, a bleak landscape of deprivation is laid bare.

Though the Green Revolution did help India overcome famines and attain food sufficiency, the country is yet to achieve food security at the household level, says the document. Worse, the report, prepared by Dr Mahbub ul Haq and titled, `Human Development in South Asia 1997', stated that South Asia was fast emerging as the poorest, the most illiterate, the most malnourished, the least gender-sensitive -- indeed the most deprived region in the world. At least seven per cent of rural and three per cent of urban households in the country did not get two square meals a day throughout the year, it said.

The Green Revolution helped the nation to raise its food production from50.82 million tonne during 1950-51 to 198.96 million tonne in 1996-97, with a buffer stock of about 36 million tonne. There was inequitable food distribution in the family. Often, women and children received a lesser share, owing to social and economic reasons. The social reasons pertained to the lower status of women in the family and ignorance about feeding children; while the economic reasons referred to scarcities at the household level, with low literacy, lack of awareness and poverty contributing to the situation, it said.

The document, prepared to coincide with the observance of National Nutrition Week recently, said the quality of life of the vast majority of people as judged by the Human Development Index (HDI) was far from satisfactory.According to the United Nations Development Project's Human Development Report, 1997, the HDI ranked India at 138th in the world in 1996, the lowest being Sierra Leone at 175.

The UNICEF report advocated mobilisation of adequate financial resources andreallocation of existing budgets to improve social development indices on a war-footing.

Nutrition, health and education, it said, were increasingly being recognised as important pre-requisites for development of human resources of a country, adding nutritional status of a community, particularly of its vulnerable groups comprising children, expectant and nursing mothers, had been recognised as an important indicator of national development.

Though the IMR had declined from 146 per 1,000 live births in 1950-51 to 72 in 1996 and the child mortality rate from 236 per 1,000 in 1960 to 115 in 1995, the figures were unacceptably high.

The document said only 3.59 per cent of the population in rural areas and 47.9 per cent in urban areas had access to sanitation facilities, while the percentage of population having access to safe drinking water in rural and urban areas was 82.8 and 84.9 respectively.

Endemic deprivation

The UNICEF document said nutritional anaemia was widely prevalent, particularlyin high-risk groups like pregnant women (over 40 per cent), children below six years (60-70 per cent) and adolescent girls (more than 50 per cent). Nearly 30 per cent of all children born had low birth weight of less than 2.5 kg, which accounted for 50 per cent of the Infant Mortality Rate in India. Roughly a third of the country's IMR was due to moderate or severe maternal anaemia. It said maternal mortality was as high as 350 per 1,00,000 live births (in 1993) as compared to 24 in industrialised countries, while 20 per cent of maternal deaths were due to nutritional anaemia. No state in India was free from Iodine Deficiency Disorders (IDD), it said, adding its prevalence was more than 10 per cent on an average, which, according to the World Health Organisation, made India an IDD endemic region.

The document said severe malnutrition among pre-school children had fallen from 15 per cent between 1975-79 to 7.1 per cent in 1995-96, but nearly 50 per cent of children continued to be malnourished, which wasvery high compared to even South-East Asian countries.

Blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency had fallen from two per cent in 1971-73 to 0.04 per cent in 1988-89. Still, mild and moderate deficiency of Vitamin A was affecting growth and development of children, besides increasing morbidity and mortality.

Diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies like beriberi, pellagra and scurvy, which were major health problems in the 1950s and early 1960s, had been eliminated. But 36.2 per cent of women and 23.6 per cent of men suffered from chronic energy deficiency as per district nutrition profile studies of 1995-96.