MP refuses to admit malnourishment deaths

Bhopal: In spite of 80 child deaths being reported in the past four months in two districts of Madhya Pradesh, the state is not ready to admit that these lives were lost to malnutrition, allege activists.

The deaths were reported from Satna and Khandwa. As many as 97,223 children in the zero-1 year age group have died between April 2005 and July 2008, according to the state government's own records.

The National Family Health Survey-III (NFHS-III) says that Madhya Pradesh tops the list of undernourished states with 60 per cent malnutrition among children.

"Severe malnutrition among children is also the highest—12.6 per cent in Madhya Pradesh as against 6.4 per cent severely malnourished children in India. Still the state is responding to the problem by denying it," alleged Sachin Jain of the Right to Food Campaign (RTFC).

In a recent reply to the Supreme Court, Satna Collector Vijay Anand Kuril attributed the deaths of children to various reasons including heat stroke, food poisoning and viral encephalitis.

Madhya Pradesh Minister for Women and Child Development Kusum Mehdele said last weekend that the recent deaths of children in Khandwa district were not due to severe malnutrition but other diseases.

"The biggest problem is that the state government does not accept that there are any malnutrition deaths. They are formally manipulating the data, status and level of malnutrition through Bal Sanjeevani Abhiyan," alleged Prashant Dubey of RTFC who was a part of the investigating team that visited places where children are reported to have died of malnourishment.

The state with the assistance of Unicef and the World Food Programme (WFP) has unveiled several schemes, including the Bal Sanjeevani Abhiyan which seeks to treat severely malnourished children. Other such schemes are the Bal Shakti Yojana and the Shaktimaan.

"The main problem is that whatever the state provides under schemes to curb malnutrition can only be supplementary nutrition, whether it is through the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) or mid-day meals. It is hard to tackle malnutrition if non-availability of food and livelihood is the problem," Women and Child Welfare Department (WCD) Director Kalpana Shrivastava said.

The state government claims to have made efforts to curb malnutrition for which it has spent millions of rupees in the past three years. But one can make out the level of nourishment provided to children from the state of Anganwadis (government-run creches) in the district.

"They lack even basic facilities—drinking water, separate toilets or space to cook," Dubey said.

Activists have calculated that the Madhya Pradesh government will take 33 years to feed all the 1.3 million malnourished children in the state.

Madhya Pradesh has 135 Nutritional Rehabilitation Centres (NRCs) which together have 1,678 beds. "Normally one malnourished child is kept in an NRC for 14 days. It means that with 1,678 beds, the state government would be able to cure only 3,356 children in a month," Jain said.

"Going by this average, it would be able to cure 40,000 children in a year and would take roughly 33 years to reach the 1.3 million malnourished children in the state," he said.

In reality, it will be even longer, he added, as of the 135 NRCs established, only 95 are fully functional.

The state's budget for the development of women and children went up to Rs 590 crore this year. Of this, Rs 300 crore was earmarked for providing nutritious food to undernourished women and children. This was Rs 190 crore more than the previous year.

"However, the percentage of underweight children in Madhya Pradesh increased from 54 in 1998-99 to 60.3 now and the percentage of wasted (extremely malnourished) children has gone up from 20 to 33, according to NFHS, despite Unicef involvement," a WCD official admitted.

But the Madhya Pradesh government has been claiming that the ratio of undernourishment has come down to somewhere around 49 per cent.

The state government schemes do not reach most of the children and pregnant mothers, says a report of the Comptroller Auditor General (CAG) of India.