International Women’s Day began over a century ago as a call for equality, for fair work and  dignity, and in recognition of women’s labour.

The Day celebrates empowerment. Yet across India, women’s bodies tell a more complicated story, one where anaemia quietly coexists with rising obesity and where exhaustion has been normalised.

I have lost count of how many women across age groups and lifestyles, have told me they are “just tired.”

So often that many women themselves have come to believe that constant fatigue is simply part of being a woman.

And yet, in quieter moments, some admit they feel something isn’t quite right, a persistent fatigue, breathlessness, dizziness, symptoms they have learned to live with rather than question.

In villages, that tiredness comes wrapped in silence, with long walks for water, meals stretched to feed everyone in the family, pregnancies too close together. In cities, it wears better clothes such as corporate deadlines, coffee instead of breakfast, health postponed indefinitely.

These happen in apparently different geographies. However, the patterns are similar.

Though I would agree growing up the situation was worse with most women completely ignoring their health across societies. The situation comparatively has since improved at least for women in the metros. With social media constantly stressing on health and fitness, taking care of oneself is slowly catching up with women. However, it is only for a minuscule well read population.

Now let us look at some important data to confirm this. According to the National Family Health Survey 2019–21 (NFHS-5), 57% of Indian women aged between 15 to 49 are anaemic, up from 53% in NFHS-4 (2015–16). Despite decades of iron supplementation programmes and national initiatives such as Anaemia Mukt Bharat, launched in 2018 to accelerate the reduction of anaemia, more than half of the country’s women remain biologically depleted.

Much of India’s nutrition policy has understandably focused on mothers and children. However, women’s health cannot be reduced to motherhood alone.

There is another nuance worth mentioning that makes the picture today even more complex.

While anaemia remains widespread, excess weight and obesity among women has also increased from about 21% in NFHS-4 to nearly 24% in NFHS-5. Increasingly, Indian women are experiencing a paradox where anaemia coexists with overweight and obesity. With diets high in calories but poor in micronutrients is creating bodies that may appear nourished but remain biologically deficient.

A woman today can be overweight, anaemic, and at risk of chronic disease at the same time. Malnutrition, in other words, does not look like hunger anymore. It more looks like excess weight layered over hidden deficiency. 

Such nutritional contradictions cannot be explained through numbers alone but more with what is normally practiced in many households. Women often stretch meals, rush through their own plates, or skip them altogether while juggling work, caregiving, and household responsibilities.

In rural homes, it may mean women quietly adjusting meals so that children and working family members eat first. In cities, the pressures look different. Longer workdays, shrinking time for home cooking, and increasing reliance on restaurant meals or processed foods often mean diets that are high in calories but poor in nutrients. And again malnutrition here does not look like scarcity. It looks like convenience. This could be playing out in apparently different lifestyles and social status. But they are pointing to similar outcomes.

This week, we will celebrate Women’s Day. The United Nations theme this year, “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls.”, calls for renewed attention to equality and dignity. And so we will speak of empowerment. We will invoke “nari shakti” like we do every year. However, a country where more than half its women are biologically depleted cannot congratulate itself on empowerment. What we praise as women’s resilience is often their ability to function despite chronic exhaustion.

Perhaps the real measure of empowerment is not how loudly we celebrate the strength of a few women, but how seriously we take the health of women at large. Women’s health in general, rarely commands the same urgency as maternal health, yet it shapes the wellbeing of families and communities alike.

Anaemia persists not because the problem is invisible, but because women’s exhaustion has long been treated as ordinary and as part and parcel of being born female.

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