The hidden hunger behind India's huge success

UJALA is starving to death. She is four months old but weighs only 1.5 kilograms, about a third of what the World Health Organisation says is normal for her age.

The sagging skin on her tiny limbs and her grossly distended stomach are signs of acute malnutrition. Her hip bones protrude like gross deformities and her face winces with a hacking cough.

It is an image often associated with famine in Africa. But Ujala is not from Africa but India, a nation destined to be an economic and political super power. For some years India has been one of the fastest growing economies and average incomes have risen steadily.

Economic reforms initiated in the early 1990s have been good to the rich. The 2009 Forbes Rich List, released this month, named two Indians among the world's 10 wealthiest individuals. India also has a rapidly expanding middle class. According to some estimates more than 200 million Indians now have spending power to rival that of consumers in developed countries such as Australia and the US.

But India is also home to a quarter of the world's hungry - about 230 million people - according to a World Food Program report released last month. More than 455 million Indians survive on $US1.25 a day or less, compared with 420 million in 1981.

A towering symbol of these two Indias is adjacent to Ujala's village in the Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India - a telecommunications antenna. So while Ujala wastes away, her family's mud hut has perfect mobile reception and wireless internet access.

Despite the economic boom, progress in reducing child malnutrition has been slow. About 42 per cent of children under five are underweight compared with 7 per cent in China, India's neighbour.

The Washington thinktank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, says almost a fifth of India's population is "food insecure".

In Ujala's state about 60 per cent of children under five are malnourished and almost one in 10 infants die before they reach the age of five. That ranks Madhya Pradesh alongside Chad and Ethiopia for child malnutrition, the institute says.

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