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Apart from poverty, factors like dietary issues, poor sanitation and low social status of women are the likely reasons for high child malnutrition in India, says a study. Although India has witnessed significant progress in its battle against child malnutrition over the past decade, the progress has been quite uneven, and child malnutrition rates still remain high in many parts of the country, data from the latest round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows. The survey of over 6 lakh households conducted in 2015-16 shows that over the past decade, the proportion of underweight children fell nearly 7 percentage points to 36%, while the proportion of stunted children (those with low height-for-age, a measure of chronic undernourishment) declined nearly 10 percentage points to 38%. Despite the progress, these rates are still higher than those of many poorer countries in sub-Saharan Africa. And in some of the worst affected districts such as Purulia in West Bengal and Nandurbar in Maharashtra, every second child is undernourished. Such high level of child malnutrition imposes a huge economic cost. Malnutrition accounted for losses worth at least 8% of global gross domestic product (GDP) in the 20th century because of “direct productivity losses, losses via poorer cognition, and losses via reduced schooling”, according to medical journal The Lancet, which published a special issue on the topic in 2013. The losses are higher for high-burden countries such as India.