Discouraging numbers: On National Family Health Survey 2019-20
The HinduWith a debilitating death toll and an economic recession, India has had among the worst effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But an express indication of the possible scale of the crisis can be gleaned from the data from the newly released National Family Health Survey 2019-20 which was conducted before the pandemic and its impact. In indicators related to women’s well-being, spousal violence declined in 17 of 22 States/UTs, child marriage declined in 18, and access to bank accounts rose in all of them, compared to NFHS-4. But the persistence of poor anthropometric measures related to hunger and nutrition suggests that existing programmes to address them, such as POSHAN Abhiyaan, will need a push and focus to meet targets such as the 2%-point decrease in childhood stunting every year. This is an imperative that would not just meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal targets but will also ensure the well-being of citizens in a country that showed significant promise in combining economic growth and general welfare in the last couple of decades before encountering major reversals lately.