Letter From India: A war with 2 fronts: Hunger and obesity
Amelia Gentleman
Thursday, December 21, 2006
NEW DELHI When PepsiCo's new chief executive arrived in Delhi this week on a Christmas visit to see her family, she came bearing gifts of a sort — promising to sell a newly expanded, specially developed collection of fizzy drinks and chips to India.
Indra Nooyi, who was recently named the world's most powerful businesswoman by Fortune, was here for what should have been a triumphant homecoming tour.
Since her promotion in August, she has been hailed as an inspirational role model by the country where she spent the first 23 years of her life, held up as an icon of India's high-achieving diaspora.
Unfortunately, the timing of her return could not have been worse. She walked straight into a dispute about the evils of junk food, arriving just as India's health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, announced that he planned to ban colas and greasy snacks in schools because they were ruining the health of the nation's children.
In a powerful speech days before Nooyi's arrival, Ramadoss warned that the wealthy middle classes were facing a "galloping" rise in obesity, heart disease and diabetes. He promised to introduce compulsory yoga in schools along with classes on healthy eating.
Moving beyond the allegations of insecticide contamination, which have shaken sales of both Coke and Pepsi in India for the past five months, he added firmly that "with or without pesticides" colas were "harmful for health and should not be consumed."
It was a rude welcome for the visiting celebrity. Nooyi fought back bravely, stressing that PepsiCo wanted to work with the Indian government to combat "the prevailing sedentary lifestyle," which she identified as the root cause of obesity-related illnesses. She announced that her company's "Fun for You" products (colas and snacks) would be balanced by its "Good for You" line (waters and energy drinks). But the expected exuberance of this trip was dampened by the controversy.
India's newly declared war on junk food represents a sharp shift in direction for the government, which until recently had been inclined to believe that it made little sense to focus on the problems of overeating when people were still dying of malnutrition.
This week, however, Ramadoss declared that the Health Ministry needed to wage a battle on two fronts, simultaneously fighting hunger and obesity.
His acknowledgment of these coexisting crises implicitly recognized the rapid emergence of two parallel Indias. He conceded that there was a growing gulf in the nation's health concerns, a rift between the diseases of affluence and the diseases of poverty.
While the nation's attention was caught up by the debate on how to stop India's 300 million members of the middle class from bingeing on sugar-laden, fat-heavy diets, the National Family Health Survey was analyzing its latest data, which (when they are published formally next year) are expected to show that, despite the country's economic boom, around 50 percent of Indian children under 5 are malnourished. Also, in some states of north India, the numbers of severely malnourished children are rising fast.
"We have one India which is galloping on the economic front, while in the other India, human development indices say we are 126th in the world," Ramadoss said, referring to India's low ranking out of 177 countries in the UN list.
"India is on its way to becoming a superpower, but unfortunately, 50 to 60 percent of children under 3 years are undernourished," he told journalists covering a nutrition conference in Delhi, adding that he felt "ashamed" at the stark contrast in problems facing the nation.
"We have the IT revolution, but then we have this pitiful infant mortality," he said. "We have on one side undernutrition and on the other side overnutrition."
Ramadoss made it clear that his strategy for tackling India's new weight problem would be to target precisely the products Nooyi was in Delhi to sell. He conceded that there might be "legal hindrances" with introducing a blanket ban on colas and chips in schools, and he proposed introducing a system of fines and penalties instead.
Health experts welcomed Ramadoss's decision to highlight the growing problem of obesity in India.
Ambrish Mithal, senior doctor at an obesity center run by Apollo, a private hospital in Delhi, said that by conservative estimates at least 30 percent of women and 20 percent of men in urban areas were already clinically obese, although some experts put the real figure at closer to two-thirds of women.
"Malnutrition continues to be the bane of India, but the people who matter in this country are affected by the opposite problem," he said. "The worst sufferers are the people working in the multinationals in urban India; they make up the new work force driving the nation's economy, working to put India on the world map. A vital component of our manpower will become sick if steps are not taken to address this."
Unicef's chief of health in India, Marzio Babille, said India was "seeing a progressive reduction in so-called diseases of poverty and a parallel increase in diseases of affluence."
"The alarm bell started ringing over the past year," he said. "We have to look at the health of this new generation of affluent Indians; otherwise we will see a whole new generation of people at severe risk of diabetes.
"Nutrition in this country has not been given any attention at all, and yet it's extraordinarily important."
The struggle with obesity will not easily be won. In every McDonald's, Indianized meals such as McCurries, Chicken Maharajah Macs and McAloo Tikki Burgers are selling fast. Ready- made brands (like Curry in a Hurry) are catering to new lifestyles. Even destitute mothers on the street corners of Delhi can sometimes be spotted pouring black colas into the mouths of their small babies. Clinics offering liposuction and gastric banding are thriving.
Nooyi knows which way her company has to turn. She said PepsiCo would be investing $500 million in India over the next few years, part of which will go to building a new research center outside Delhi, where scientists will work on concocting low- calorie and low-caffeine drinks.
Hunger and Obesity in India
Linear Mode
