Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Malnutrition in India Essay

The second problem is about the low social status problem of the Indian women. As compared to Indian men, Indian women from the rural are the last one to eat their meals, thereby leading to an imbalance diet and they even were not able to meet the daily nutrition requirement that they needed to achieve a healthy feeding. Usually, they looked so skinny, especially child-bearing women who are more likely to give birth to malnourished babies. Additionally, Indian mothers from the rural area were not able to obtain a high education level, hence, they don't have appropriate knowledge on how to feed their children with a balanced healthy food. This consequently makes the newborn babies obtain insufficient nutrition from these mothers. This will retard babies their growth and development. [12].
Third, the greatest problem for malnutrition of children in India is poor sanitation. More than half of India's population do not have their own toilet which means they have to open defecation or they go out to public places to defecate. Plus, the disgusting hygiene that resulted from the lack of sanitation was even made worst by the crowded population. Growing up in this kind of environments with abundant of fecal pathogens will lead to some permanent debilitating effect, such as building up fecal germs in the body that can manifest as a severe intestinal disease making it hard for them to take adequate nutritious foods, and hence resulting in stunting growth. They are most likely also be more prominent to be infected by parasites that will also cause some intestinal damage and again reduce the adequate nutrition that the child needed. About 61.7 million Indian children have stunted growth with the highest prevalence in the world which is the harmful result caused by poor sanitation thereby causing malnutrition due to the diseases stemming from it [13].
For the reasons given above, India government has cooperated with The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to eliminate the problem of malnutrition in children. They have implemented some actions since 2013 till now, such us Open Defecation Free, Micronutrient Nutrition, and women nutrition. These are the main actions where they put a lot of efforts in carrying it out and the results of their actions show a good progress in the reduction of malnourished children nowadays in India.
Combating open defecation is a big action for the Indian to improve their sanitation and hygiene environment because this can prevent children from diseases and malnutrition caused by this poor sanitation. UNICEF works with the state governments to advocate the national sanitation, hygiene and to educate the people about the importance of good sanitization concept. In addition, the open defecation plan gave people a better understanding of the toilet benefits, and the UNICEF also makes sure that the rural communities can be supplied with enough toilets as well as ensures that the toilets technologies used are with a better quality, so the toilets can be used for a longer span of time [14].