It could be a warehouse stocked with supplies for India's urgent flood relief operation: hundreds of boxes full of fortified biscuits from the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) piled up to the ceiling. Relief it is, but for a perpetual emergency.

This stuffy, vast warehouse outside Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh state fills up and empties every month or two, like some cavernous, insatiable mouth. It's the backroom to India's malnutrition crisis, in which a fifth of the population is malnourished and nearly half of all children are underweight - twice the rate of Africa.

"India remains one of the most undernourished countries in the world," said Professor Jean Drèze, hunger expert at the Delhi School of Economics. "When hunger ruins the wellbeing and future of millions of children, the term 'emergency' seems appropriate."

Journalists, politicians and donors tend to see emergencies as dramatic events - giant waves tearing into coastlines, earthquakes shattering cities, villagers stranded atop their flooded homes. Silent, gnawing hunger rarely makes headlines.

The chronic crises in states like Madhya Pradesh remain forgotten - even as the rate of children underweight has climbed to a staggering 60 percent there in recent years.

"The figures speak for themselves," said Amit Anand from WFP in Madhya Pradesh.

The U.N. agency provides food aid to schools and workers, but its funding is falling in India - even as the Indian government crawls up the list of WFP donors.

"It's supposed to be a food surplus country," Anand said.

The market in Jhabua town, a flyblown place on the western, tribal edge of Madhya Pradesh, makes this easy to believe. The air is pungent with spices and carts stacked high with green chillies, okra and plump gourds line the streets.

Out of town, the rolling landscape is lush with maize fields, soybeans and grassland. But some 45 percent of the district's under-fives are either moderately or severely malnourished.

Independent India has been good at curbing famines but bad at battling chronic hunger, as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has noted. But hunger is a crisis devoid of panics, screams and dramatic footage. Its silence makes it even more deadly.

India has 57 million undernourished children - over a third of the world total. Malnourishment makes children more likely to die of disease.

According to India's latest National Family Health Survey, infant mortality stands at 57 per 1,000 births - lower than that of impoverished neighbour Bangladesh.

"What is needed is not just releasing emergency funds, but putting in place effective, comprehensive and durable programmes of nutritional support and social security," said Drèze.

A barrage of government food programmes - among the largest in the world - are meant to do just that. India has committed itself to giving free mid-day school meals to all children.

In Jhabua, WFP hands out its fortified biscuits as a popular morning school snack. The under-fives are catered for by an armada of anganwadis, community care centres where women cook basic dishes for children under five. And the list goes on.

"There is no dearth of schemes - you think of it and there is one," said WFP's Anand.

But hunger is a many-headed Hydra: Chop off one head and it just grows another.

Inflation is one of them. India's boom is pushing veggies out of reach of the poor and beyond the budget of mid-day school meals.

"Where can you find five rupees (12 cents) for a kilo of vegetables? Where can you find 25 rupees (62 cents) for a kilo of lentils?" exclaims Durga Vairagi, a school headmaster in Jhabua. The daily meal budget is two rupees (5 cents) per child. "Then there's the salt, oil... Somehow we are managing. We have to make it successful."

Then there's the soil. Most Jhabuans, poor indigenous villagers, are stuck with small patches of land where it rains too much, or not at all, or nothing much grows. So they join India's exodus from farmland to the cities.

"Fertile soil is not available, holdings are very small and population growth is tremendous," said Dnyaneshwar Patil, a top Jhabua official. "Only two, three months a year they stay here."

And there's the problem of reaching people even when they're at home.

In an anganwadi community centre outside Jhabua, a dozen ragged children squat on the concrete floor and hold out their metal bowls for a serving of sweetened rice. These are the lucky few who made it there from the area's scattered hamlets. In schools, too, only around 70 percent of enrolled children show up, despite all the schemes and good intentions.

India's anganwadi programme is only working in a "half-hearted manner", according to prof Drèze.

Officials like Patil would agree. "We get regular funding, but the problem is in the pipeline, with corruption, lack of training and everything else."

Leaks in the pipeline make for malnourished children.

You see them on street corners, in fly-infested railway stations, or plodding after their parents in the fields. Kids with matchstick legs, dressed in tattered rags and with woolly shocks of hair made blonde by malnutrition. Sometimes you even see the bloated bellies of protein deficiency.

But India's crisis doesn't end with the toddlers.

Starvation has also hit adults, and indebted farmers are committing suicide. Over half of all pregnant Indian women are anaemic - which also boosts infant mortality.

Figures might be improving, WFP said, but not fast enough - and certainly not in Madhya Pradesh, India's arid heart.

"In spite of runaway economic growth, there has been little reduction in child malnutrition during the last 10 years or so," said Drèze.

Maybe it's because nobody cares enough until crisis footage reaches television studios, until a disaster of the magnitude of the monsoon floods hits?

"Apparently, a crisis merits attention only when it results in catastrophe, not earlier," veteran rural reporter P Sainath has said.

But in Jhabua, among the toddlers clutching food bowls and the soaring malnutrition rates, it's hard to say whether the hunger catastrophe is around the corner, a thing of the past or a beast that has already crept up on its silent victims.

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