Hyderabad: The National Family Health Survey has recently announced that nutrient deficiency is rampant in the country’s children below 5 years of age. The Center should have positively responded to the Niti Ayog’s recommendation that the Center’s development agenda should accord top priority to nutrition. But what did the Center do in this regard? It has washed its hands off the responsibility. All the hopes of positive action on the part of the government to effectively take forward the Poshan Abhiyan to the next stage were thus dashed.
Allocations to child welfare were drastically shrunken in the latest union budget. As we study the budget, it is evident that the allocations to the Integrated Child Development Scheme would be curtailed by Rs 5000 crore. That will make the allocations reduced to Rs 21,000 crore.
Sometime back, the NITI Ayog had suggested an action plan under which all the responsibilities of mother and child health and nutrition were to be entrusted to Anganwadi centres at the village and habitation level. The Ayog had also stated that a sufficient number of Anganwadi workers should be appointed at every centre and the skills of the workers should be upgraded through training from time to time.
It has been found that 90 percent of the child’s brain is formed within 1000 days of its conception. This is the time when the pregnant mother needs nutrient diet. When that is the case, the allocations to the Anganwadi centers should have increased in accordance with the growing need to spend more on providing nutritional diet to the mother and child. Instead of increasing the allocation, the Center imposed a cut on it. The manner in which priorities have changed is not only causing dismay among the experts of health, nutrition and food rights but also among lay the observers.
About three decades ago, the apex court had issued directives that all the children of below six years age, adolescent girls, pregnant and neonatal mothers should be provided with nutrient food at least for 300 days. The Integrated Child Development Scheme has been in the vogue in the country since more than four and a half decades. Though the court had called for the establishment of 17 lakh Anganwadi centers for vaccination and distribution of nutrient diet, there are only 13.77 lakh centers in the country till today. According to available data, nearly one-fourth of these Anganwadi centers do not have drinking water facility and 36 percent of the centers do not have a toilet. Many of them have been turned into places illicit earnings by the staff members themselves.
ICDS is the biggest nutrition scheme in the world. Failure to provide drinking water and electricity facilities to all the Anganwadis has been hurting the scheme since the past few years. 68 percent of mortalities of children below 5 years of age are a result of malnutrition. Though the authorities claim that malnutrition is being addressed comprehensively on the basis of the lessons learnt from the lapses, around 7 lakh infant mortalities are taking place due to malnutrition in the country.
Seven months ago, “Global Health Science” magazine had warned that malnutrition will be felt by an additional 40 lakh children in the backdrop of the Covid-19 crisis. Failure to correct the ground situation and refusal to heed quality recommendations has resulted in a condition wherein 30 percent of the World’s stunted children are in India. The country is also the home to 50 percent of the World’s undernourished children. How can we realize Sreshth Bharat, without strengthening our future generations?
