Essay On Malnutrition In India

As said our approach in establishing a link, between agriculture, food and nutrition in India, and how malnutrition can be reduced in India is to trace the shortcomings of some issues and their contribution to malnutrition.

First, the basic cause is the decline in the production of food grains and also the promotion of cash crops by the industries. According to a survey by an organisation in Mumbai shows that there is a trade-off of about 3 lakh hectares every year, in the land under cultivation of food crops to cash crops. This is mainly due to increase demand of cash crops like sugarcane, cotton, jute, etc. by sugar, cotton and jute industry respectively. This increased the production of these as more demand means high prices which

They are forced to sell it in the local grain market or ‘mandi’ due to limited access to the market information as there are no or little facilities available with the farmer to know the actual price of his produce so he is forced to sell it to the local middlemen who eats up a major portion of the farmer’s income. This continues to exist because of the fact that a major proportion of our farmers are illiterate. As mentioned above also, multiple channels of distribution that eats away the pockets of both farmers and consumers, this partly happens because they get loans from these middlemen and get in a contract with them and are forced to sell their produce earlier to them at a much lower price. Most of the small farmers still depend on the local moneylenders who charge high rate of interest and this leaves the farmer in a situation of increased loans and finally in the vicious circle of poverty. There are many other problems like the lack of basic infrastructure and a large part of farmers still depending on rains for irrigation, lack of cold storage facilities and warehouses, harvest spoilage cause over 30% of farmer's produce going to