KOCHI: Angus Deaton, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, had cited the Kerala example to show that the Chinese growth for men and women are not impossible in India.
In the 2009 paper ‘Food and Nutrition in India: Fact and Interpretations’, co-authored with Belgium-born Indian development economist Jean Dreze, Deaton had said men and women in Kerala are growing taller by 1.29 cm and 1.16 cm per decade respectively, even faster than China. The average heights of Chinese children between the ages of 7 and 14 years increased by approximately 8.04 cm between 1951-58 and 1979.
“The growth rate of heights in China and Kerala are in line with historical experience, while India as a whole is making much slower progress, but not exclusively for women,” he wrote.
Deaton had found it “puzzling” the relatively high prevalence of self-reported hunger in Kerala and said it raised “further questions about the interpretation” of figures on rural population going hungry.
“The puzzlingly high levels of child under-nutrition in India (and south Asia) point to the possible need to re-examine this assumption. Consider, for instance, Kerala,” he wrote.
According to National Family Health Survey-3, 23 pct of children under three years in Kerala are underweight, 16 pct are wasted and 25 pct are stunted. However, other indicators of child health and wellbeing suggest children in Kerala are doing quite well. For instance, the infant mortality rate is only 13 per 1,000 — about the same as in, say, Kuwait, Costa Rica or Malaysia.
“Generally, child development indicators are much better in Kerala than in countries with similar proportions of underweight children. For instance, the proportion of underweight children in Kerala is not very different from the average for sub-Saharan Africa, but the infant mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa is about eight times as high as Kerala. “It is, of course, possible that children in Kerala would be doing better in some respects if they were not “held up” by low weights and heights, wrote Deaton and Dreze.