Jaipur: Malnutrition among children in Rajasthan has taken ominous proportions. The Hungama (Hunger and Malnutrition) survey carried out recently by Naandi Foundation indicates that the situation in many districts has worsened when compared to what it was about a decade back. The Hungama Survey, released on Tuesday by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, mentions 10 districts in Rajasthan. These districts are among a sample size of 112 districts in the country. The districts for the survey were selected using the Child Development Index developed in 2009 for UNICEF India. The survey covers 100 rural districts that ranked at the bottom of the index and 12 districts ranked near the top. “For Rajasthan, we included 10 districts, interviewed 7,683 mothers and 11,319 children. They are Banswara, Baran, Barmer, Bharatpur, Dholpur, Dungarpur, Jaisalmer, Jhalawar, Karauli and Kota. Malnutrition was calculated by us using four measures: underweight, stunting, wasting and mid upper arm circumference (MUAC), a scale now followed by the World Health Organisation. “By stunting we mean those who have not grown in proportion to their age while wasting is a weight versus height measure. We then compared it with statistics from the District-Level Health Survey (DLHS) carried out by each district between 2002 and 2004 that had statistics on children in the age group of 0 to 5 years who were underweight,” says Manish Raikar of Naandi. Malnutrition has also been categorised in the survey as either severe or moderate. “Those who have a standard deviation of less than two in the bell graph were categories as severe while those with a standard deviation of less than three were called moderately malnourished,” he adds. According to the study, malnutrition among children aged 0 to 5 years in Banswara has now deteriorated from what it was in 2002-04. While the percentage of those severely underweight has gone up from about 15% to 25%, those moderately underweight have risen from 40% to 50%. But the good news is that in the rest of the nine districts, the proportion of underweight children has gone down from what it was in 2002-04. “But that does mean that these districts have overcome the problem of malnutrition. Most of these districts are still plagued by problems of Stunting and Wasting. And these are all, including the MUAC, measures of malnutrition. The very fact that they exist itself is a matter of concern. Datas for these are there in the National Family Health Survey but we did not compare our data with them since we had district figures only,” says Raikar.