Friday, August 31, 2012

Modi's response to a question on malnutrition in an interview with Wall Street Journal

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's response to a question on malnutrition in an interview with Wall Street Journal
During an interview with Wall Street Journal Chief Minister Narendra Modi gave elaborate answer to a question regarding malnutrition. 

Mr Modi said, “We are the first state in the country to raise the issue of malnutrition. It came to our mind that Gujarat is by and large a vegetarian state. And secondly, Gujarat is also a middle-class state. The middle class is more beauty conscious than health conscious – that is a challenge. If a mother tells her daughter to have milk, they’ll have a fight. She’ll tell her mother, ‘I won’t drink milk. I’ll get fat.’ They have money but she’s beauty conscious, she’s not health conscious. So being a middle-class state is also a problem for me. A large segment of the population in my state is middle-class. Second is vegetarianism.

“So a lot needs to be explained to both the beauty conscious and the health conscious. We have to request to them that there should be a good nutritional situation. We gave a budget of 700 crore rupees ($126 million). But these things are such that you see a sudden change in a child after the age of 13-14 years. They grow up so fast – from zero to 13 you don’t come to know how they got so big. So we are going through that stage.” he said.

“Even after a lot of improvement – we still have to measure (malnutrition), conduct surveys. Until that is done, this perception will remain. But I’m quite confident. We will try to get a drastic change in this. Just as we’ve become a model in the electricity sector, Gujarat is going to come up as a model in this also. I can’t make any big claims, because I don’t have a survey in front of me yet", he added.

It is noteworthy that Gujarat government is taking a range of measures to tackle malnutrition problems, including ramping up spending on rural health workers, modernizing nutrition centers, and trying to better track young pregnant women.

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