New Delhi, Oct. 31: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has convened a meeting of the Council on Nutrition in November following international reports highlighting malnutrition in India.

A report by the International Food Policy Research Institute and another by Save the Children had pointed out that the country was home to a third of the world’s malnourished children. The reports said 43 per cent of India’s children were underweight, seven million children under five were severely malnourished and 55 per cent Indian women were anaemic.

“It is true that the Prime Minister has convened the meeting of the nutrition council in the first week of November. But it has got nothing to do with those reports. The reports have not said anything that we did not know,” an official with the women and child development ministry said.

The Prime Minister has always taken a keen interest in nutrition, the official said. “He had once said that the high levels of malnutrition among children are a national shame,” the official added.

But activists who work in the area see a link between the reports and the proposed meeting.

“These reports have for sure thrown light on certain dark realities which the government, which is obsessed with GDP growth, wanted to bypass,” said Sujatha Cheerath, who works among children, pointing out that the council has not met even once since it was set up two years ago.

Ananda Varadarajan, who runs Balvidya, an NGO which works among children, said the revelation that even Bangladesh was ahead of India in nutrition might have upset the government. “These reports, which reveal that the country has both the highest number and the highest proportion of underweight children, might have jolted the Indian government which is beaming with pride over the ‘successful’ conduct of the Commonwealth Games,” she said.

India, which had committed in 2000 to halving hunger and malnutrition by 2015, is not showing adequate progress, the Millennium Development Goals report has revealed. The country has achieved just 0.9 per cent progress, it said.

Activists have alleged that although the women and child development ministry runs a number of schemes, nothing has worked well on the ground. But a ministry official said: “We have conceived many new schemes for all age groups of women and children. Since the Prime Minister is taking serious interest in the topic, you will see significant changes in the coming days.”