COMMENT: Can your child clear the Flamingo Balance Test?

Representative image

“Can your five-year-old child pass the Flamingo Balance Test of standing on one leg for 60 seconds? asked this story in  The Economic Times. I was curious as this Test is what the government is proposing to implement in schools to assess the fitness of students.

I have a six-year-old and asked her to do it. Am glad to report that she aced the test, despite a wobble or two.

It was a relief because a mail from her school last month had disturbed me.

Announcing a nutrition programme, the school said it had conducted a survey among students last year and “recognized the impending health risk factors among them”.

The survey found:

> 4 out of 10 students were Overweight/Obese

> 2 out of 10 students were Underweight

This meant 60 percent of the children had health problems. And quite surprisingly, obesity was a more acute worry than being underweight.

Perhaps, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

A study last year said India has the highest number of obese children, after China. We had 14.4 million kids that were overweight in 2017. The number would have only increased in this one year.

So why are our children getting fatter?

Here are three sets of data that could probably throw some light.

> Mumbai has 0.03 acres of open space for every 1,000 citizens, compared to 12 acres in London and six acres in Singapore. Other cities in India may fare only a tad better than Mumbai. Less space means children hardly have a place to run around, play or cycle. How many playgrounds are there in your neighbourhood?

> Children between the age of 6 and 17 in India watch 35 hours of television a week, or five hours a day. We are basically bringing up couch potatoes.

> A study of 13,200 children across India showed that 93 percent of them ate packaged food, and 68 percent had sugar sweetened beverage more than once a week.

That is a deadly combination. Imagine this. Our children love watching television, and prefer to gorge on burgers or munch on chips – washed down with juices and carbonated drinks - while hooked to their favourite cartoon. And even if they very well prefer to go out and play, there is hardly any space for them to do that.

One in five children in Hyderabad were found to be at risk of lifestyle/metabolic diseases in adulthood. The situation will be similar in other cities.

This is a crisis. But are we – parents, teachers, urban planners and policymakers – even listening?