One of Real faces of Super Power in South Asia

Just 100 kilometres off the nation's capital, infants die of hunger; in Purulia in West Bengal women are sold as sex slaves; in Juhapura in Ahmedabad Muslim riot victims slum it out; in Jammu, Kashmiri Pandits search for dignity...

By: Anjali Puri

Attached to each malnourished little body is a charming name. Gudiya’s daughter, Sofia, with her sad, pointed face, looking far smaller than her eight months. Ten-month-old Javed, prone to frequent bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, gaunt eight-year-old Sheba. Welcome to Malgozha and its children. In Delhi, doctors worry that children are overweight. In Malgozha, just 100 km and a two-hour drive away, child after child, crying unattended on a charpoy, slung casually against her sister’s hip, or playing naked in muddy pools of monsoon water, is painfully underweight. But no one seems to worry.

Malgozha falls in Bulandshahr district, by no means one of Uttar Pradesh’s poorest. Yet, according to the government’s District Level Household Survey on Reproductive and Child Health (2002-2004), this district has among the highest percentages of moderately and severely underweight children in the 0-6 years age group. A Muslim-populated village where most families live off an acre of land and some cattle, Malgozha is, local NGOs say, one of its worst-off settlements.
A lethal combination of maternal helplessness and state indifference has made Malgozha’s infants too thin and small. Mothers, many of whom have had several children in quick succession, and look weak, harassed and distracted themselves, don’t appear to know that children need regular amounts of nourishing food while being weaned off breast milk; that without this critical intervention, they are exposing their kids to recurring sickness and faltering growth. Ask Nazima what she feeds her children: her vague answer, and that of too many women here, is, chai aur thodi si roti.

In theory, the state rescues its mothers and their children from such debilitating ignorance through the tentacles of the Integrated Child Development Services. The ICDs programme tells mothers how to care for their young children, what to feed them, what to do when they get diarrhoea, provides mothers and children with nutritional supplements, monitors their health, runs balwadis for little kids. It delivers these services at the village level through anganwadi workers. Every community of a 1,000 people should have one. That’s the theory.

Now, the practice. Malgozha, home to 318 families and as many as 545 children under 5, has never seen an anganwadi; its children have never been weighed, their health is not monitored, their mothers are not counselled, nobody gets any supplements. The ostensible reason: there is no Class X pass woman in the community available to run an anganwadi. Shama Parveen, a class IX pass woman, is ready, willing, and by all local accounts, able. Her application was turned down. And that was it—no other woman, from a nearby village or town, was found to run an anganwadi in a village only a few kilometres away from the bustling pottery town of Khurja.

The health bureaucracy does find its way here to put polio drops into young mouths—thanks to the national and international muscle behind polio eradication. But it retreats when its job is done, apparently oblivious to sunken eyes and protruding stomachs. Malgozha helps to explain why India has the world’s largest number of underweight children under 5—a staggering 57 million.