What does India have in common with Ethiopia? In both countries, the percentage of children under five who are underweight is 47. Unicef has published a global ?report card? on children?s nutrition, earlier this month, in which India and south Asia ? with the significant exception of Sri Lanka ? come out ingloriously. South Asia has ?staggeringly high? levels of underweight children (46 per cent). India, Bangladesh and Pakistan together account for half the world?s underweight children, in spite of being home to the developing world?s under-five population, 44 per cent of whom are stunted and 15 per cent wasted. The child-related statistics published in this report are linked throughout with those relating to women. South Asia is the only region in the world in which girls are more likely to be underweight than boys. In India, one out of every three adult women is underweight and therefore at risk of delivering babies with low birthweight. Of the estimated more than 20 million low-weight births each year in the developing world, more than half occur in south Asia and more than one-third in India. South Asia is also the region with the largest proportion of unweighed births ? only one in four births is weighed here.

Such figures gesture towards fundamental and comprehensive failures on a country?s part. Basic things ? education, health, gender equity, water, sanitation ? are not working properly at the most rudimentary levels. And a crucial failing is the government?s inability to realize that ?better nutrition can change a nation?s fortunes?, as the report puts it. Besides, malnutrition is very often an invisible plight: three-quarters of the children who die from it show no outward sign of their vulnerability. This is, at every level, a crisis of education and political accountability, arising not only out of infrastructural inadequacy, callousness and corruption, but also out of profound inequalities (economic as well as gender-based) and urban-rural disparities. Such a large number of undernourished children also bodes ill for a country fighting against alarming levels of HIV/AIDS. What is worst about India and Ethiopia being peers in this matter is that the former is far from being a famine-stricken country. There is no dearth of food in India, just a systemic failure to value human lives at their most powerless.