India's obesity crisis: Reorienting food policies can address the problem

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s warning against rising obesity in India highlights a long ignored health crisis. He quoted a recent study published by British medical journal Lancet predicting that 440 million Indians would be obese by 2050. On World Obesity Day, on March 4, Lancet stated approximately 80 million Indians were obese, with 10 million falling in the age cohort of 5-19 years. When combined with the fact that over 100 million Indians suffer from diabetes, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research (the country tops the charts for juvenile diabetes), and the country has one of the highest burdens of cardiovascular disease, Mr Modi’s call points to an urgent need for drastic dietary and lifestyle readjustment, especially among urban Indians. Particularly concerning is the increasing prevalence among children aged 10 to 14 years of Type 2 diabetes, which is associated with obesity. Mr Modi’s prescription of reducing edible oil consumption by 10 per cent and regular exercise is unexceptionable but it will only partially address the problem.

 

Growing prosperity, urbanisation, and sedentary lifestyles are out of sync with Indian cuisine, undoubtedly among the world’s most delicious but traditionally suited for manual work. The explosion of high-carb junk food from big food corporations, along with addiction to online games, has exacerbated the problem among the affluent. This is as true of the United States and China, with whom India shares the podium in the world obesity stakes. Kerala sought to address this with a “fat tax” but that reflects a misunderstanding of the causes of India’s obesity crisis. The problem has grown steadily on account of food policies adopted in the early years of the republic to address critical food shortages and rampant malnourishment — legacies of colonial rule. The solutions — via the Green Revolution, the establishment of a massive food procurement infrastructure with assured prices to farmers, and the public distribution system (PDS) —played stellar roles in ensuring that India was by and large better fed. But the necessary focus of food-subsidy policies on staples such as wheat, rice, and sugar (which was discontinued some years ago) has had the unintended consequence of skewing Indians’ diet towards high-carb, high-sugar diets, which are the despair of modern dieticians.

 

Though there is no gainsaying that a cohort of India’s population requires some measure of food support, the real conundrum lies in reorienting these measures to modern-day health and dietary imperatives. Right now, India faces the health paradox of having a worryingly large number of obese people coexisting with a high proportion of malnourished and undernourished people, anaemia among women in particular. Ironically, the latter problem is as much a function of skewed diets related to carb-heavy food-distribution policies as the former. Cutting back on oil is sensible, but the government would do well to act on the Prime Minister’s previous focus on millet, one of the healthiest grains around and less damaging to the environment. This apart, more incentives for poultry and pisciculture, among the faster-growing agribusinesses, would ensure that more Indians could gain access to the proteins vital for robust health. At the same time, public-interest programmes on health and pack warnings on junk food would go some way in addressing early a health problem that could rapidly become an epidemic.