Shame and shammer: PM on malnutrition

Ten years back, in April 2001, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said in his inaugural address at a national consultation on “Towards a Hunger Free India” in New Delhi: “Democracy and hunger cannot go together. A hungry stomach questions and censures the system’s failure to meet what is a basic biological need of every human being. There can be no place for hunger and poverty in a modern world in which science and technology have created conditions for abundance and equitable development.” And yet, all his government did was merely rename and ‘strengthen’ the public distribution system and to “use food stocks in an imaginative and purposeful way” to stabilise prices and boost exports.

Hunger proliferated, and malnutrition grew.

When I see Prime Minister Manmohan Singh express shock and disgust, terming malnutrition a ‘national shame’ I am not the bit surprised. Seeing the timing of the report before the coming State Assembly elections in five States, the entire exercise seems to be aimed at the electoral prospects. Releasing a report on Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) in New Delhi recently, he said:  "the problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame. Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high." The bigger shame of course is that it took the Prime Minister 7 years in office to feel concerned at the extent of ‘malnutrition’ that prevails among children below 6-years age.

A year back, the international child rights organisation Save the Children had come up with a damming report, which probably missed the Prime Minister’s attention. After all, we can’t blame his office for keeping the Prime Minister in the dark about the failure of the high-growth trajectory in making any significant reduction in poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Nor did he find anything unusual when the Planning Commission raised the percentage of ‘below poverty line’ population on the recommendation of Suresh Tendulkar committee report. This happen despite India’s GDP continuously remaining on a high. This is because the entire policy planning, as we know, continues to revolve around opening up for more foreign direct investment, acquiring agricultural land for the industry and providing all kinds of sops and tax-concessions to the industry in the name of ‘policy paralysis’.

The Prime Minister probably had also missed reading the report of National Family Health Survey III 2005-06 which showed that half of all children in India were under-nourished.

Shocking indictment

Another damming report “A fair Chance of Life” released in September 2010 did not hit the front pages of prominent newspapers simply because it wasn’t backed by any group of parliamentarians. Nevertheless, it was a shocking indictment of the economic paradigm that actually perpetuates hunger and malnutrition by widening economic disparities. The report said: “Of the 26 million children born every year, approximately 1.83 million died before their fifth birthday”. Half of these children actually die within a month of being born.

Half of the 1.83 million children, who die before their fifth birthday in India, actually die within a month of being born. This is a clear pointer the dismal state of health of the mothers. After all, a newly born malnourished child owes much to the impoverished mother’s health, which in turn points to the inability and inefficiency of the public distribution system to reach food to the poor and the needy. Hunger and malnutrition are closely correlated. Feeding the population is the first requisite to building up a healthy population.  Supplementary nutrition programme like the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) can only be effective if first people are adequately fed.  

The Prime Minister is right when he said: “We have believed that a mother’s education level, economic status of the family, provisions of sanitation, status of women and breast-feeding affect children’s nutrition”. Each survey validates these linkages but where is the nationwide programme to fight malnutrition on a war footing? The ICDS programme, aided by a faltering anganwadi system, is crying for attention. For 37-years now, ICDS has failed miserably to reach anywhere near its objective of ensuring child health and nutrition. It failure can be gauged from the fact that the ICDS programme operates in the 100 districts in which the HUNGaMA survey was done. The deteriorating health of the ICDS programme has to be first addressed before it can be expected to take care of expecting mothers and the children.

Still more importantly is to first understand the crucial ink between growing hunger and malnutrition and the economic policies being perpetuated. Hunger is the result of faulty economic policies which widens the gulf between the haves and have-nots; is the outcome of policies that take away community control over natural resources like water, forests and farmlands; and is also the fallout of neoliberal policies that removes social security nets and allows corporate takeover of agriculture. The more the government destroys the very foundations of agriculture forcing farmers to abandon farming and migrate into the urban cities in search of menial jobs, the more is likely to the growth in hunger and malnutrition. Instead of extending what is visibly a mere lip-sympathy to the poor and malnourished, the Prime Minister needs to recast his economic policies making it pro-people and pro-environment. 


Source: Deccan Herald, Jan 14, 2012. 
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/219133/shame-shammer.html


You may also like to read Dinesh Sharma's report in Mail Today
'National shame' on PM Manmohan Singh as kids go hungry  
http://bit.ly/yuWxOc

Only lip-sympathy for the malnourished

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh termed malnutrition a national shame, it appears as if only the legislators and the parliamentarians are the ones who are affected. A day after the Prime Minister released a survey report that stated 42 per cent children below the age of 6 yrs are malnourished; the Andhra Pradesh Assembly gave a hefty hike in salaries and allowances, and provided swanky SUVs to its legislators. The salary of AP minister will increase from Rs 70,000 to Rs 2 lakh, and the monthly allowance for MLAs will rise from Rs 36,000 to Rs 90,000. Telengana MLAs are being provided with swanky Toyota SUVs.

This is coming at a time when the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) is struggling with a terrible paucity of funds. Minister for Child Development Krishna Tirath has sought an increase of Rs 2 lakh crore for the next five years to augment the nationwide programme that helps provide supplementary nutrition to children and their mothers.

While the poor and malnourished are languishing, Delhi MLAs were showered a few months back with hefty pay hikes and additional allowances. An MLA, who used to get Rs 42,000 per month, now gets anything between Rs 90,000 and Rs 1 lakh. Ministers are getting a higher salary of Rs 1.2 to 1.3 lakh per month. On an average, the hike in basic salary resulted in a 100 per cent increase with a slew of additional perks like travel allowance, constituency allowance and allowance for attending the session were also appreciably enhanced.

Prior to Delhi, nine States including Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka had raised the salaries and perks of their legislators. Ironically, the State government too have time and again expressed their inability to provide its own share of resources to augment the supplementary health programmes. While the State’s have all the money for showering freebies for legislators, they have no money, for example, for the anganwadi workers. The anganwadi workers get a maximum of Rs 1800 per month, and are expected to counsel and motivate the expecting mothers. The anganwadi helpers are paid still less. In other words, the anganwadi workers and the helpers are themselves surviving ‘below the poverty line’. 

And now take a look at how the country is trying to fight malnutrition with meagre resources. According to the ICDS website, for supplementary nutrition the financial norms were revised recently. The cost of supplementary nutrition (per day per beneficiary) for different category of beneficiaries vide the Ministry’s letter No. F.No. 4-2/2008-CD.II dated 07.11.2008, are: Children (6-72 months): Rs 4 (up from Rs 2); Severely malnourished children (6-72 months): Rs 6 (up from Rs 2.70) and Pregnant women and nursing mothers: Rs 5 (up from Rs 2.30). No wonder, the Ministry has sought a four-fold hike in the budget of ICDS. All earlier efforts of the Ministry, and also by various Plan panels, acknowledging that the allocation for the priority sector programme was abysmally low had met with the standard answer: no additional funds are available.   

Only a miracle can remove malnutrition in the allocated Rs 4 for a child and Rs 6 for a pregnant mother. The 2005-06 National Family Health Survey III had showed that half of all children in Indiawere under-nourished.

In September 2010, when an international child rights organisation Save the Children had come up with a damning report, the Indian Parliament had passed a bill that raised the basic salary of parliamentarians by three times, from Rs 16,000 to Rs 50,000 and at the same time raising their daily allowances and pension. Ironically, the Save the Children report “A fair Chance of Life” had stated: “Of the 26 million children born every year, approximately 1.83 million died before their fifth birthday”. Half of these children actually die within a month of being born. Parliament did not even take notice of the severity of the prevailing health crisis. 

Therefore when I see Prime Minister Manmohan Singh express shock and disgust, terming malnutrition a ‘national shame’ I am not the bit surprised. Seeing the timing of the report before the coming State Assembly elections in five States, the entire exercise seems to be aimed at the electoral prospects. Releasing a report on Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) in New Delhirecently, he said:  "the problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame. Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high." This happen despite India’s GDP continuously remaining on a high.

While the entire policy planning, as we know, continues to revolve around opening up for more foreign direct investment, acquiring agricultural land for the industry and providing all kinds of sops and tax-concessions to the industry in the name of ‘policy paralysis’, the hungry and malnourished continue to live on hope. For a country which has the dubious distinction of having the largest population of hungry – an estimated 320 million – and ranks below Sub-Saharan Africa in malnutrition, there is little money when it comes to addressing malnutrition. Hunger and malnutrition are closely correlated. Feeding the population is the first requisite to building up a healthy population. Supplementary nutrition programme like the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and anganwadis can only be effective when adequate resources are made available. But where is the money?