Exploration of assessment mechanisms of nutritional status in Indian children: A structured algorithm or a bureaucratic fallacy

Pages: 409-413
Ranju Anthony (Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, (JNU) , New Delhi)

The article dwells on the importance on ‘accurately’ assessing the nutritional status of children, while correctly decoding the term ‘malnutrition’, in the context of terminologies, viz., ‘severe and acute malnutrition’, ‘under-nutrition’ and ‘over-nutrition’, while following both internationally accepted methodologies and India’s intrinsic demographic complexities that varies from state to state. While “direct assessment methodologies”, including, ‘anthropometric’, ‘bio-chemical’, ‘clinical’ or ‘dietary’ related methods help in assessing immediate/present individual level measurements that can directly relate to nutritional mapping of an individual to a whole family, “indirect assessment mechanisms”, including gathering information related to ‘vital statistics’, ‘economic factors’ and ‘ecological variables’ for populations can help policy makers in capturing interdisciplinary variables that are to be further interlinked to arrive at a programmatic algorithm; that may help them in encapsulating more research specific rigor. This additional rigor is expected to amalgamate both multidisciplinary/ interdisciplinary approaches, while using underlying trans-disciplinarity to extrapolate and analyse national data using proven international and national conventions of ‘nutrition classifications’. Correct assessment methodologies leading to correct classification would further provide that programmatic impetus that may be the ‘solution’ or rather ‘missing link’ that presently restricts India’s present path-dependent nutrition program architecture.