Background

A stark crisis haunts the healthy growth of children in India: the crisis of child hunger, which not only inflicts immediate suffering on them but also exacerbates their vulnerability to long-term problems. Even as millions of children in India are adversely impacted by food poverty, the problem is often severely overlooked. We need to do better for children, especially considering how malnutrition caused around 69% of child deaths in India in 2019-20. 

Such a large-scale prevalence of child hunger is a scathing indictment of structural inequalities, which can be located in poverty and extreme socioeconomic disparities. If we pause to reflect on how India, because of its largely successful green revolution, is one of the largest producers in the world, these figures become even more alarming. Despite an abundance in production, India ranked 107 out of 121 nations on the 2023 Global Hunger Index.

The severe ramifications of poor nutrition are not simply confined to physical health. Instead, they spill over and interfere with the intellectual, cognitive, and social development of children, thereby harming learning outcomes. Hungry children are more likely to lag academically behind their classmates. They become prone to dropping out of school and have trouble focusing. Without being able to receive the benefits of education because of hunger, children are forced to give up their aspirations of socioeconomic mobility, and remain stuck in vicious cycles of intergenerational poverty. 

To end child hunger, then, is a collective moral and social obligation. It is this vision that prompted the founding of the Food Equity and Empowerment Drive (FEED), which strives to work towards ameliorating the dire problem of child hunger.