Half of Indian teenage girls underweight, anaemic; 4 in 10 defecate in open
As
many as 50% of teenage Indian
girls are underweight, 52% are anaemic, about 39% still defecate in the
open and about 46% do not use hygienic methods of menstrual protection.
These
are the findings of a new survey report, the Teen
Age Girls report (or the TAG report), released by Nanhi Kali, a project
by the Naandi Foundation, which works with adolescent girls.
As
aspirations of teenage Indian girls soar, as we reported in the first part of
the series, most of them struggle with gender norms and a lack of ‘new age
skills’--such as travelling alone or typing out a document on a computer in
English--as we reported in the second part of the series.
This
concluding part looks at the status of health and access to sanitation, at a
time when 63.2 million teenage Indian girls are set to be first-time voters in
2019. The health of the teenage girl holds significance not only for her own
life, but also for the health and well-being of the children she may have.
The
survey covered 74,000 teenage girls from 28 states and seven cities, and asked
them questions on nine topics including educational and health status, basic
life skills, agency and empowerment within and outside the home and
aspirations. Read
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