"Women too thin and anemic, giving birth to tiny babies, who are poorly fed in the first two years of life: That's the synopsis of the tragedy," Aguayo said. "India needs to break this intergenerational cycle of malnutrition."
That cycle is plainly evident with 20-month-old Deep and his mother, Bachiya Devi, here in the dirt-poor eastern state of Bihar, where the proportion of malnourished children younger than 3 has actually risen, not dropped, in recent years, from 54% to 58%.
Like her son's, Devi's arms are stick-thin, the bangles adorning them sliding up and down with no resistance. The sinews of her neck protrude, while her chest seems lost far below the folds of her canary-yellow sari. Her careworn face suggests an age much older than her 45 years.
With a blind husband who is unable to work, Devi depends on her parents to help out with buying food. She reckons that 100 rupees a day would be enough to guarantee two square meals for her husband, herself and the three of their five children who live at home. But from her modest vegetable stall she earns an average of 30 rupees a day, the equivalent of 70 cents.
"There are four or five days a month when the pot doesn't boil and we go hungry," Devi said. At home, little Deep, her youngest child and only son, eats one roti, or piece of flatbread, a day, plus some rice and occasionally some vegetables.
"I'm a poor woman," Devi said.
"What more can I afford?"
As she spoke, her sleeping son twitched fitfully on a bed in a "nutrition rehabilitation center" here in Saraiya sponsored by UNICEF, which in effect provides triage for the worst-hit.
The ward is a study in cheated childhood. Mumta, at 22 months, looks less than half her age; her rib cage can be easily felt beneath her clothes. Muskan, 1 1/2 , lies still under her mother's watchful gaze, a blue hand towel covering nearly her entire body. Vikas, almost 4 and suffering from cerebral palsy, can barely sit up without help from his gaunt mother, who is 45 and pregnant with her fifth child.
There are flickers of hope. After 10 days of eating nutrient-laden eggs and other foods not available at home, Deep has gained almost a pound and a bit more energy. Other children in the ward also exhibit small signs of improvement.
All the youngsters are so chronically malnourished that they belong to a category known as "severely wasted." India is home to 8 million such cases needing immediate therapeutic feeding and treatment.
