Akhil Puvvada

Middle School Finalist, Grade 8
Cedar Park, TX

The Silent Emergency: Child Malnutrition in India

I was eight years old the first time I saw my mother cry without making a sound. 

She was holding a photograph — small, worn at the edges, like it had been handled a thousand times. In it was a little boy, maybe two years old, sitting in the dirt outside a concrete house. He was smiling. His name was Arjun. He was my mother's nephew, born to her sister back in their home village outside  Chennai. My mother had never met him in person. She had only ever seen him in pictures, first as a newborn, then sitting up, then standing, then this last one, smiling in the dirt. 

There were no more pictures after that. 

Arjun died three weeks after that photo was taken. He was two years and four months old. The cause  listed on the documents my aunt sent over was "acute malnutrition." But my mother always said it more simply, in a voice so quiet it barely existed: He was just hungry. He was just so, so hungry, and we were so far away. 

She put the photograph back in the envelope. She never cried like that in front of me again. But I never forgot it — the way grief looks when someone has run out of words for it. 

I think about Arjun every time I scrape food off my plate into the trash. I think about him every time I  complain about what's for dinner. And I think about him now, when I look at the numbers, because behind every single one of those numbers is a child exactly like him. 

Of all the development challenges facing India today, child malnutrition is the most pressing. India currently leads the entire world in child wasting rates, with 18.7% of children under five affected, over 21  million children with dangerously low weight for their height. (Down To Earth) Another 35.5% of children under five are stunted, causing permanent, lifelong developmental damage. (Outreach-international)  These are not abstract figures. They are children with names. Children who smile for photographs. 

What makes this so devastating is the cruel irony at its heart. Despite a 50% increase in India's GDP since  2013, more than one-third of the world's malnourished children still live there. (Wikipedia) The money exists. The food exists. The failure is in who it reaches — and who it doesn't. 

Poverty leaves 62 million children with weakened immune systems and stunted cognitive development.  (Outreach-international) In rural areas, 50% of children are underweight. Among scheduled tribes, that figure climbs to 56%. (Outreach-international) Girls are often fed last, or not enough. Government food programs are undermined by corruption and inefficiency, so help that exists on paper never arrives at the door of someone like Arjun's family. (Countercurrents)

Damages echo across lifetimes. Malnutrition causes impaired brain development, lower school performance, and lifelong vulnerability to disease. (Wikipedia) Malnourished girls grow up to have malnourished babies (Wikipedia), and the cycle swallows another generation whole. 

But we are not helpless. We can support the Akshaya Patra Foundation, which delivers free school meals to over two million children in India daily, because a fed child shows up, learns, and survives. We can write to representatives urging protection of USAID nutrition programs. We can start conversations at school, at the lunch table, the one meal most of us never think twice about. 

Arjun got two years and four months, and a smile nobody who saw it ever forgot. We cannot bring him back. But we can make sure his story is the last one that ends that way.