Uma R Maheswari

The company’s product is a packaged, ready-to-eat nutrition bar Ah!rogya Bar made from locally available and traditional ingredients like ragi, jaggery and peanuts without the addition of any artificial flavouring and colouring agents or preservatives. The nutrition bars are promoted as a better and healthier snack option and sold in the commercial market. The product is intended to be affordable and widely available, thereby, improving access to necessary nutrition. Each 25gm bar is estimated to contain essential micro and macronutrients and at least 6 gm of protein. We-Mana functions as a social enterprise, with its product, it also intends to address the problem of inadequate, insufficient and hard to access nutritional requirement primarily among vulnerable groups of children, women and any other marginalized groups that are in need of nutrition. The reason for this exclusive stress on nutrition is because over 49% of our children are malnourished. While a lot is being done to educate our children, there is very little awareness that, for this education to have the right impact the child needs to be healthy and needs to receive a basic amount of nutrition. Quoting from an article “Malnutrition: India’s Silent Catastrophe” (https://countercurrents.org/2018/05/17/26705/) written by Moin Qazi a developmental Journalist “Undernourishment can lower a child’s IQ, increase the risk of diet-related non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart diseases, and reduce productivity. Going by NFHS-4 results, it appears that 40 percent of our future workforce will be unable to achieve its full physical and cognitive potential. The World Bank estimates this to cost India’s economy $12 billion a year in higher healthcare spending and lost productivity. The well-known economist Dean Spears says the price of all this is far greater than the costs of fixing it.” Hence the urgency for us as fellow citizens to do everything in our capacity to fix this problem.