The paper uses the latest available information on food prices and wages from the 2011 National Sample Survey data set.
Three out of four rural Indians cannot afford a nutritious diet, according to a recent article in the magazine Food policy. Even if they spent all of their income on food, nearly two in three of them wouldn’t have the money to pay for the cheapest possible diet that meets the requirements set by the government’s main nutrition body, he says.
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Unlike Thalinomics from the Economic Survey, which provided a more optimistic picture of meal costs, this study uses the wages of unskilled workers who make up a larger proportion of the population than industrial workers, and includes items such as dairy, dark green leafy fruits and vegetables which are essential according to official Indian dietary guidelines.
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The paper, titled Affordability of nutritious diets in rural India, is written by economist Kalyani Raghunathan of the International Food Policy Research Institute and others, and uses the latest available information on food prices and wages from the 2011 data set of the National Sample Survey.
The findings are significant in light of the fact that India performs poorly on many nutrition indicators, even as the country claims to have achieved food security. On Friday, the Global Hunger Index showed that India has the highest prevalence of child wasting in the world, reflecting acute malnutrition. On indicators that simply measure calorie intake, India performs relatively better, but does not take into account the nutritional value of those calories.
The National Institute of Nutrition guidelines for a nutritionally adequate diet require that adult women eat 330 g of cereals and 75 g of legumes daily, along with 300 g of dairy, 100 g of fruits and 300 g of vegetables, which should include at least 100 g of dark green leafy vegetables. By selecting the cheapest options from the real Indian diets (wheat, rice, bajra, milk, curd, onions, radishes, spinach, bananas), the study calculated that a day’s meals would cost 45 rupees (or 51 rupees for a man adult).
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Even if they spent all their income on food, 63.3% of the rural population or more than 52 crore of Indians could not afford that nutritious meal. If they set aside just a third of their income for non-food expenses, 76% of rural Indians could not afford the recommended diet. This does not even take into account the meals of non-earning household members, such as children or seniors.
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“These figures are somewhat speculative, but they reveal the magnitude of the food affordability problem in rural areas of India: nutritious diets are too expensive and incomes too low,” the document says.
Although their data ended in 2011, since food prices and wages rose, the study authors recommended that the government develop a similar tool to monitor dietary costs and the affordability of nutritious meals. Currently, food costs are measured through consumer price indexes (CPI) that weight food by share of spending. “In poor countries like India, CPIs are heavily skewed towards staple foods with low nutrient starch, which means that trends in food CPI can be misleading from a nutritional point of view,” the document said.
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