KOCHI: It is difficult to beat the Chinese when it comes to growth—be it population or the mass-marketing of ‘Made in China’ products. But when it comes to growth of height, Chinese are falling a tad shorter than Keralites.
This year’s Economics Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton in his 2009 seminal paper Food and Nutrition in India: Fact and Interpretations, co-authored with Belgium-born Indian development economist Jean Dreze, pointed out that men and women in Kerala are growing taller by 1.29 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,” wrote the Princeton economist, who won the Nobel for devising important new ways of measuring household consumption, living standards and poverty that shaped the current political economy debate.
Deaton had found the relatively high prevalence of self-reported hunger in Kerala “puzzling” and said it raised “further questions about the interpretation” of figures on rural population going hungry.
According to National Family Health Survey-3, 23 per cent of children below the age of three years in Kerala are underweight, 16 per cent are wasted and 25 per cent are stunted. However, other indicators of child health and well being suggest that children in Kerala are doing quite well. For instance, the infant mortality rate is only 13 per 1,000—about the same as in Kuwait, Costa Rica or Malaysia. “Generally, child development indicators are much better in Kerala than in countries with similar proportions of underweight children. It is, of course, possible that children in Kerala would be doing even better in some respects if they were not ‘held up’ by low weights and heights,” wrote Deaton and Dreze.