Breaking down the question
The question asks for two connected accounts — the consequences of chronic malnutrition and its remedies. The word chronic is the key qualifier: it points not to episodic hunger but to a persistent, structurally embedded condition that reproduces itself across generations. A sociological reading must therefore move beyond the biomedical framing of calorie deficits towards the social relations that distribute food, care and life chances unequally.
Chronic malnutrition in India is best understood as a symptom of what Amartya Sen calls capability deprivation — the inability to convert entitlements into functional well-being. It is patterned by caste, class, gender and region, making it a sociological rather than merely a nutritional problem.
How to approach it
Open by defining chronic malnutrition sociologically, linking it to persistent poverty and deprivation. Devote the first half to consequences, organised across the individual, household and societal levels — physical, cognitive, economic and social reproduction effects. Devote the second half to remedies, distinguishing welfare-based interventions from structural transformation.
Use empirical anchors such as stunting and wasting figures, and ground remedies in schemes and rights-based approaches. For deeper linkage between deprivation and the wider stratification order, connect the discussion to poverty, deprivation and inequalities.
Model answer
Chronic malnutrition denotes a sustained deficiency in nutritional intake and absorption that impairs human functioning over the long term. Sociologically, it is not an accident of scarcity but a durable outcome of unequal entitlements — the way caste hierarchies, agrarian relations and gendered household distribution allocate food and care.
The consequences are cumulative. At the individual level, stunting and wasting compromise physical growth and cognitive development, curtailing the child's future capabilities. At the household level, sickness and reduced labour capacity deepen the poverty trap, since the malnourished body cannot secure the very entitlements that would remedy its condition. At the societal level, a large undernourished population erodes the demographic dividend and reproduces intergenerational disadvantage, as underweight mothers bear low birthweight infants.
Malnutrition is also socially selective. It concentrates among Dalits, Adivasis and the rural poor, and the intra-household bias against the girl child renders it deeply gendered. This confirms that hunger is stratified, not random.
Remedies operate at two levels. Welfare interventions — the Public Distribution System, the Integrated Child Development Services, the mid-day meal scheme and the National Food Security Act — treat food as a justiciable right rather than charity, an approach Dreze and Sen champion. Structural remedies address the roots: secure livelihoods, women's education and autonomy, sanitation, and land and wage reform that raise real purchasing power.
Sustainable eradication demands convergence between these welfare and structural strands, so that entitlements translate into genuine capabilities.
Examiner's perspective
A strong answer resists the temptation to write a health-science essay. The examiner rewards candidates who frame malnutrition as capability deprivation and demonstrate its patterning by caste, class and gender. Naming Sen and Dreze and invoking the entitlement approach signals conceptual command. The most common weakness is listing schemes without explaining the shift from a welfare to a rights-based paradigm — remedies should be analysed, not merely enumerated.