As a Physician and Rheumatologist who currently works in North India and has worked in Kerala in the past, I can assure you of the following.
Anemia is very common, even by highly relaxed standards
Cause of this widespread anemia is majority nutritional (Iron and/or B12 deficiency) arising from a vegetarian diet and rising sanitation standards.
Economists should not comment on a “reality” they are neither familiar nor understand.
Indians aren’t any special. Healthy people with healthy normal diets achieve normal Hb levels in India. And correcting deficiency brings back Hb to normal levels once deficiency is corrected.
Caveat: Some people of tribal ancestry areas with historically high malaria endemicity have hemlobinopathies (thalassemia, HbS, HbE etc) where the normal values are low. However these are special situations that should be excluded from the determination of normal values (heterogeneity).
In healthy, people without any nutritional deficiency, Hb values typically are above 16 (males ) and above 14 (females). However anemia definition gives a wide breadth (14.5 and 12.5 for males and females respectively).
In clinical practice anemia gets investigated only when Hb falls well below that levels.
In Iron deficiency, Iron stores gets depleted before Hb drops under 12.5 and someone with Hb under 12.5 must have some deficiency or defect. Iron deficient state (without anemia) has public health consequences with people complaining of widespread pains (fibromyalgia like presentation that improves with replenishing Iron) or fatigability and “low energy” both of which can affect productivity and can have economic consequences (beyond the impact on maternal and neonatal mortality in women of reproductive age)
The first thing I checked after seeing is whether both writers are from economic background. Indeed economists have a special “skill” (Dunning Kruger) to write without irony on things they have no clue on reality.
My article with Chirag in today's ET where we investigate why anaemia prevalence among Indian children and women was not going down despite government schemes & rising incomes. We found that serious problems with benchmarks and measurement are grossly overstating the levels 1/n