two-year-old Rajini's naked shrivelled frame casts a dark shadow over a rising India, where millions of children have little to eat.


The children are scrawny, listless and sick in this run-down nutrition clinic in central India with its intermittent power supply. If they survive they will grow up shorter, weaker and less smart than their better-fed peers.


Rajini weighs 5kg, about half of what she should.


"She's as light as a leaf, this can't be good," says her grandmother, Sushila Devi, poking her rib-protruding stomach in the clinic in Shivpuri district in Madhya Pradesh state. True Smile

This applies to children that come from poor families or orphans being raised with limited, or in some cases absent, state resources. Children that fail to meet the minimum acceptable standard of life for the nation where that child lives are said to be poor. In developing countries these standards are lower and when combined with the increased number of orphans the effects are more extreme.

The legal definition of children in most countries is 'persons under the age of eighteen', while biologically the transition from childhood to adulthood is said to occur with the onset of puberty.