22,000 underweight newborns in Telangana

HYDERABAD: Telangana has 22,046 underweight (below 2.5 kg weight) children born between March 2018 and April 2019. A total of 5,89,571 child birth were recorded at Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS).
The data reflects the reality emerged in the 4th National Family Health Survey, which said that 28% of children under the age of five years are stunted, which indicates undernourishment for some time. Eighteen percent are wasted, or too thin for their height, which may result from inadequate recent food intake or a recent illness causing weight loss, and 5% are severely wasted. Taking into account both chronic and acute under-nutrition, 29% babies are underweight.

Even during the first six months of life, when almost all babies are breastfed, 12% children are stunted, 20% are underweight, and 40% are wasted.
“There are lot of differences in children’s nutritional status by background characteristics,” said Dr Charita, a gynaecologist from Nalgonda.
All three indicators of under-nutrition are much higher in rural than urban areas. They decline sharply with mothers’ schooling. The rate is lower for first-born children. A higher proportion of children from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are undernourished than those belonging to other castes.
The numbers obtained by TOI shows that Rangareddy district has the highest number of underweight babies, 2006, followed by Hyderabad district with 1,445 underweight babies. The percentage of underweight babies to total births is highest in Nizamabad with 1,700 underweight babies out of 17,000 births.