How fixing female malnutrition can boost India's economy by $15-46 billion

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Afsana Bano is 25, or so her Aadhaar national identity card said. With glee, she confessed that she was born in 2001. That made her 18, her 5’7 frail figure and delicate bones cradling a three-day-old baby that weighed 2.6 kg instead of the ideal 3.3 kg at this stage.
Bano’s levity and ignorance is representative of a cycle that keeps millions of Indian mothers and children, particularly in the most populous, poorest states, undernourished and incapable of learning and earning enough, thus holding back Indian economic progress, according to several research studies.Bano was 18 when she married and was underweight when she conceived, weighing 51 kg in the eighth month of pregnancy, gaining no more than 200 gm by the ninth.
Studying till class 12, Bano had an above-average education in rural Sitapur, where no more than 16.4% of women have had 10 years of education, compared to 32.9% in UP and 35.7% nationwide. But she never got the attention or counselling that the government health system was supposed to give her.
This is particularly important in Sitapur, where 36% of married women are adolescents, according to the 2015-16 National Family Health Survey (NFHS)--or NFHS-4--data, compared to an average of 21% in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous and third-poorest state, by per capita income, and 27% nationwide.

 With 4.4 million people, Sitapur is classified as one of 25 “high priority districts” across Uttar Pradesh and 184 across India identified for special attention to pare child marriage and adolescent pregnancies.But the programme to address early marriage and teenage pregnancy, the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK), a five-year-old national youth health programme, was given 1% of National Health Mission (NHM) funding in Sitapur, falling over a year from 3% in 2016-17.