Dietary guidelines of ICMR-NIN fail to do due diligence, exhibit food bias

This opinion piece is by Dr. Sylvia Karpagam, a public health doctor, with input from other members of the Working Group on Health and Nutrition.

In April 2024, the ICMR-NIN released Dietary Guidelines for Indians (DGI), selectively quoting data from the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (CNNS 2019). Instead of bringing out evidence-based dietary guidelines befitting a 106-year-old institution of national importance, they have failed to do due diligence and instead seem to have released a vegetarian dietician’s recipe booklet to enthral India’s middle class and elite.

In what can only be seen as deliberate and wilful obfuscation, the DGI makes it appear like ‘severe forms of undernutrition have largely disappeared’ and only ‘subclinical manifestations of undernutrition and anaemia persist as public health issues’.

Relegating ‘ghosts’ to the past

It is surprising that, without any national consultation or consensus, NIN is orchestrating this position; why is there such a hurry to show India in such a good light? This seems to be in keeping with a broader agenda of erasing incriminating data to project India as a superpower where all kinds of malnutrition are relegated to a ghostly past.

Several objections have already been raised to a group of researchers from India who claimed in June 2021 that their analysis of CNNS shows that anaemia is much lower than current levels – another ‘ghost’ relegated to the past!

In reality, is it possible to erase the fact that even before the pandemic, data from the same CNNS shows that 36 percent of children under five in India were stunted and 33 percent underweight? Forty-two percent of children from the Scheduled tribes and 36 percent from the Scheduled castes were underweight. This was 48 percent in children from the poorest wealth quintile compared to 19 percent from the richest quintile. India ranks 111 on the Global Hunger Index (GHI)ing , with 125 being the poorest performance.

Is it also possible to erase the fact that only 21 percent of children aged 6-23 months were fed an adequately diverse diet, that just six percent had received a minimum acceptable diet, and only nine percent had received iron-rich foods? In most states, cereals were the most commonly consumed food group (over 85 percent), while eggs, fish, chicken or meat were least commonly consumed ( less than five percent) among school-age children and adolescents.

Read more here