The Integrated Child Development Ser vices (ICDS), a scheme launched by the gov ernment in 1975, was meant to address the health and nutritional needs of women and children. But the high prevalence of child malnutrition is a severe indictment of it The mid-day meal scheme, along with the ICDS and a strong public distribution sys tem might have addressed the needs of chronically hungry children. But all these schemes remain mired in corruption even as they are rendered useless by apathetic implementation.
Six-year-old Vishal starts his day with a cup of tea and two biscuits bought from a pavement stall. Lunch is khichdi from a local charity. Vishal saves half of it to eat later in the afternoon. By night he’s hungry again. His mother can afford just a small, Rs 5 packet of kurkure. That’s all she has at the end of the day. It’s another typically hard day in the life of this child who lives with his mother on the streets of Mumbai’s Khar area
Vishal manages to eat just 856 calories a day. That’s roughly half the recommend ed intake.
Two-year-old Surja Basfore lives on Plat form No 4 of Kalyani railway station in Kolkata. Breakfast is usually half a puri Lunch is two handfuls of rice and dal. Din ner might be another couple of handfuls of rice and dal or it might be one roti. Surja lives with his five-year-old sister and his lep rosy-afflicted father. They beg for a living earning Rs 20 to Rs 25 every day between them. Surja and his sister mostly survive on food thrown away by railway passengers They manage to eat just 1,000 calories be tween them.
It’s the same story with six-year-old Priya Breakfast is two plain dosas and a glass of watery milk. Sambhar or rasam with rice is lunch. She has a glass of tea in the evening Dinner is curd rice with onions. Priya ‘lives with her family outside an electronic store in Panagal Park, a shopping district in Chen nai. She manages to eat 1,410 calories a day which is 300 calories short of what she should be getting at her age.
Vishal, Surja and Priya are some of the children whose ‘food lives’ were explored by Child, Relief and You (CRY), an NGO that works with children. Bidisha Fouzer of CRY says it’s an exercise in putting faces and names to stark figures.
“Last month, when the Global Hunger In dex report stated that 42% of all the under nourished children in the world live in In dia, we decided to put a face to this. We spoke to children in different life situations — from a street child to a child living in a tribal vil lage — to put together a kind of diet diary of the poorest children. This was done to un derstand their dietary intake. The result was shocking. The children were getting by on as little as half their required calories. This is at a stage when nourishment is crucial to their development,” she says.
India has more children than any other country in the world. At just over 365 mil lion, India has more children than the total population of the US. Half of India’s chil dren are malnourished and in real terms it’ as if Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world, is underfed.
The Integrated Child Development Ser vices (ICDS), a scheme launched by the gov ernment in 1975, was meant to address the health and nutritional needs of women and children. But the high prevalence of child malnutrition is a severe indictment of it The mid-day meal scheme, along with the ICDS and a strong public distribution sys tem might have addressed the needs of chronically hungry children. But all these schemes remain mired in corruption even as they are rendered useless by apathetic implementation.
Vishal, Surja and Priya are the sad faces of this failure.