Dulled by Hunger

When hunger constantly gnaws at a child, how is his or her learning affected? It can be further asked whether the child recovers from early food insecurity, whether this experience impacts learning later in life. These are vital questions for a country like India aspiring to be a knowledge economy and presently enjoying a demographic dividend (rising share of working age people in the population). But chronic food insecurity stalks a large section of the people, while lack of opportunities to work threatens to turn the demographic dividend into a curse. It turns out that early and persistent hunger is bad for acquiring local language vocabulary and developing the ability to read. For English too, the learning outcome is impacted — but at a later age, probably because English is learnt later in the curriculum. Still, the child may make up the deficit over the short term in reading ability, after acquiring some foundational skills. But no such luck with mathematics, where the damage due to chronic hunger in early years will not just stick on but get aggravated later. This is because a hungry child who missed out on basics in maths will struggle with more complex maths subsequently — as the maths being learnt at one level is built up directly on the maths learnt at previous level. This and other warnings have been sounded in a new British-Indian study ‘Inequalities in adolescent learning: Does the timing and persistence of food insecurity at home matter?’. Authored by Elisabetta Aurino, Jasmine Fledderjohann and Sukumar Vellakkald, the report draws a link between access to food and learning outcomes, which can impact India’s productivity and economy over the long term. With one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition and household food insecurity, India cannot afford to lose the war against hunger afflicting her young. Only those who experience persistent hunger can feel the irritability and shame it breeds, blighting their existence. Less apparent is their struggle to concentrate upon and remember what is learnt, the overall harm to their cognitive development.

For households with children going hungry, painful trade-offs have to be made — spending more on food means cutting back on books, taking the children out of school altogether and putting them to work. Since hunger in early years can have lasting effect, tackling food insecurity can help resolve India’s ‘learning crisis’, says the report. It recommends that feeding programmes for poor children should be scaled up, free remedial classes be offered to help them catch up, and if unavoidable, to provide them opportunities for safe and paid work without missing out on learning. These are good suggestions, but to put matters into perspective, let us take the mid-day meal scheme which aims to give at least one proper meal a day to about 12 crore children in government run or assisted schools. Despite achievements, this scheme is sputtering due to graft, blinkered focus on coverage rather than nutritional quantity and quality, patchy implementation, deprivation of children of highly backward groups, and occasional food poisoning due to unhygienic and careless cooking practices. Despite fast economic growth, India’s track record in child nourishment compares unfavourably even with African countries like Ethiopia, primarily due to lesser support for pregnant women and children in the womb. Education from 6 to 14 years has been made compulsory and free, but the country still awaits a new education policy (NEP) to build upon the policies of 1968 and 1986, or to see 6% of GDP spent on education. Instead, budgets for not just primary and secondary education, but also for nutritional support in the form of mid-day meal scheme are being cut. Human resource planners have been quibbling over ‘cultural heritage’ in draft NEP 2016, but are hardly clear about improving employability as learning outcome or developing critical thinking skills among the young. Once the heat of election dissipates and the dust settles, these are the sort of issues that will really matter in the long run.