He’s visiting this particular hospital since it has organised a medical camp for the day, and speaks to us while a woman with a toddler in her lap waits on a stool beside him. That is an unhealthy number for a hospital that still has no paediatricians, and for a district where over 600 children have died of malnutrition this year alone.The malnutrition ward in the hospital at Palghar’s Mokhada taluka looks somewhat like the waiting room of a suburban train station, except that instead of luggage the women there carry Super light luggage Manufacturers underweight children in their arms.

A junior doctor, Gopal Ghughe, sits in a cabin in one corner. So this means that the rampant malnutrition in Palghar has a combination of factors behind it, which need to be battled at every level.. And what compounds the problem is that households lack the sort of awareness which, if not from schools, comes from rural hospitals conducting regular medical camps, such as the one going on in Mokhada. But in some cases of severe acute malnutrition, we have to refer the child to the district hospital at Palghar." He continues, "But it isn’t malnutrition per se that’s claiming lives. Dr Ghughe gets to the root of the problem at hand saying, in Hindi, "Underage marriages are a critical issue — a young girl who doesn’t get a balanced diet herself isn’t expected to give birth to a healthy child. Children are dying because their immune systems are not strong enough to combat infections born out of unhealthy living conditions."He adds, though, that the parents are usually unwilling to make that journey since their hand-to-mouth existence leaves them with no money for the bus fare involved. The number of malnourished babies there is around 80 when The Asian Age visits.Otherwise, even as Dr Ghughe speaks to The Asian Age, the toddler in the woman’s lap next to him might one day become yet another casualty in a war we are yet to win.

It’s a fairly large room, conceived for 10 beds that are now lined up against a wall, with a sea of mattresses strewn on the floor creating more space for a wave of admissions.The malnutrition ward at Mokhada’s hospital was built for 10 patients, but had 80 children admitted there on the day The Asian Age visited. We get cases of moderate acute malnutrition, where there’s still hope for a patient to survive.