Early Death Assured in India Where 900M Don’t Eat Enough

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-13/early-death-assured-in-india-where-900-million-go-hungry.html

Early Death Assured in India Where 900M Don’t Eat Enough
By Mehul Srivastava and Adi Narayan - Jun 13, 2012 2:30 PM ET

The death certificate for 3-year-old Rashid Ahmed hides more than it reveals.

It lists his name, misspells his mother’s and says he died of malaria. What it doesn’t say is how little he weighed when he was brought to hospital with the disease in New Delhi one August night, how his ribs jutted from his chest, or how helpless his doctor, 28-year-old Gyvi Gaurav, was in trying to save him.

“It was hunger that killed him,” said Gaurav, who worked the night of August 15 at St. Stephen’s Hospital and was on watch when the toddler died. “He was so weak, so malnourished, that he would have died the first time he ever got really sick - - from malaria, diarrhea, anything.”

For Rashid’s mother, Nazia, the three-decade road from her birth to the death of her son ran alongside a slow collapse in India’s elemental struggle to feed its people. More than three- quarters of the 1.2 billion population eat less than minimum targets set by the government, up from about two-thirds, or 472 million people, in 1983. India’s failure to feed its people came as the economy accelerated, with gross domestic product per capita almost doubling in the past decade.

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