'Stunting down to 50% in Tharparkar'.

KARACHI -- Every other child in Sindh's Tharparkar district suffers from stunting, according to a study conducted by the Sindh Planning and Development Department.

Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah chaired the launch ceremony of the report titled "Assessment of Stunting in Tharparkar" at his official residence. The report was initiated by the Ombudsman Sindh, is a regional subsidy of the International Ombudsman Institute (IOI).

It found major risk factors associated with malnutrition such as chronic poverty, poor access to water, poor hygiene and sanitation practices, seasonal migration, early marriages, low birth spacing, lack of connectivity of transport and inadequate human resource across the sandy dunes of Thar and the marshy lands of Parkar.

One of the most densely populated deserts in the world, Tharparkar's population was around 1.6 million according to the 2017 census. Around 325,000 of those were children below the age of five.

At the start of the ceremony, the P and D Department gave a presentation about the study and highlighted that the issue of stunting in children under five years old has been a major problem in Pakistan for the last two decades.

It was 41.6 per cent in 2001 and 43.7 per cent in 2011, 40.2 per cent in 2018, and remained globally critical. Sindh's stunting rate was 48.9 per cent as per National Nutrition Survey (NNS) 2011 and 45.5 per cent as per NNS...