ALTHOUGT THE SAMAJWADI PARTY government which has been ruling Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous (200 million) state since 2012, is more reputed for caste and community-based politics and its high tolerance of criminals and criminality, sometimes — even if rarely — a socially beneficial proposal is produced by the state’s massive 2.7 million-strong bureaucracy.
One rare and unambiguously socially beneficial proposition is the state government’s Nutrition Mission which proposes to merge the meals programme of children aged 0-6 years of the Central government’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) with the national Mid-day Meal (MDM) programme for children in the 6-14 age group.
If the UP government’s Nutrition Mission announced last November (2014) attains its objective, a massive cohort of 29.72 million children between ages 0-14 will be provided a nutritious daily meal free-of-charge. In a state which grudgingly hosts a population greater than all European countries except Russia, and in which 42 percent of children under age three are underweight, 52 percent are stunted and 19.5 percent are wasted, this will be a huge — and electorally profitable — achievement.
“Convergence of the two schemes will automatically improve the meal delivery systems of the state’s 150,986 anganwadis established under ICDS and 866,361 elementary schools covered by the mid-day meals scheme,” says Kamran Rizvi, director general of UP’s Nutrition Mission. Currently, meals provided to infants (and lactating mothers) in the state’s anganwadis are prepared in a central location in each district by NGOs and transported to village serving centres. This involves huge logistical costs. On the other hand, the mid-day meal provided to over 120 million children countrywide — reportedly the world’s largest MDM scheme — is cooked on the premises of every school. Under the new proposal, both ICDS and MDM meals will be prepared together and served to children from the two target age groups. To facilitate this merger, the allocations for anganwadi meals will now be transferred to the MDM accounts of school principals and gram pradhans (village panchayat heads).
“The inability to reach well-prepared nutritious meals to infants in the 0-6 age group is one of the major infirmities of the ICDS programme. This is the most important age group for any intervention against malnutrition. Nutritious anganwadi meals apart, home visits and meetings by anganwadi workers for health counselling, regular child growth monitoring and proper distribution of good quality supplementary nutrition are necessary to reverse the child malnutrition epidemic sweeping the state. The Nutrition Mission will have to factor these elements into the programme as well,” says Arundhati Dhuru, food security advisor of the state government.
However, Rizvi believes that integration of the meal schemes of the two Central government initiatives is a good step which will result in higher primary enrolment in UP’s primary/elementary schools. “Youngest children provided their meals in primary school premises will become familiar with them and willingly enter primaries when they come of age. This will increase primary enrolment. Moreover, the mid-day meals of primary schools will improve nutritionally with ICDS professionals helping out, and costs incurred in the logistics of providing anganwadi meals will be saved,” he says.
Uttar Pradesh records 550,000 child deaths every year, of which half are directly linked to the poor nutritional status of the mother and the child despite 188,000 anganwadi centres providing supplementary nutrition to children aged below six, pregnant and lactating mothers and adolescent girls for at least 300 days per year. Moreover, while census numbers indicate that the state hosts 31 million children under age six, the number of children covered by ICDS anganwadis aggregates only 18 million, meaning that 40 percent of the state’s infants don’t receive any early childhood care and education or nutrition.
In the circumstances, any proposal to rectify this untenable situation needs to be welcomed.
Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)