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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | A bad return on investment

A bad return on investment

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published Published on Oct 14, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 14, 2011
-Live Mint
 
As United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi prepares to intervene next week in the great national debate about who is poor, she might want to visit north-eastern Mumbai to see how the poorest are not even classified as such and how a giant government scheme to save their children from malnutrition is failing.

The nauseating stench from a mountain of garbage greets a visitor to Rafi Nagar at the base of the Govandi dumping ground in north-eastern Mumbai, heralding a neighbourhood that houses about 2,000 of the city’s poorest people.

Barely half an hour away from the financial nerve centre of Bandra, Rafi Nagar lies in Mumbai’s infamous malnutrition belt of Mankhurd-Govandi, a 4km, grimy swathe of land, which has the city’s lowest scores in the Human Development Index.

Malnutrition fatalities in the area came to light when the Hindustan Times reported the death of 16 children in 2010 in Rafi Nagar. While the death toll has moved up to 18, little else has changed in the lives of this community of rag-pickers, and other sorters and processors of the assorted detritus of the city.

Almost no one is officially regarded as poor, though many qualify, and so there are few ration cards that entitle them to subsidized food and other welfare measures.

Severe malnutrition is endemic and many families have more than one malnourished child. A key reason is that most mothers are underweight. Few, however, consult doctors and those who do, are unable to afford the medication doctors prescribe.

A malnourished mother is likely to give birth to a malnourished child, doctors say. In Mumbai, the proportion of babies with low birth weight is 40%, nearly double the national average, according to the Mumbai Human Development Report 2009, prepared by the ministry of urban housing and poverty alleviation.

Aasma Sheikh, the mother of Gulnaz, a severely malnourished child who attracted media attention last year and died in March, is underweight. Not surprisingly, two of her kids, one four years old, the other five, are malnourished. Sheikh was prescribed medicines, which she cannot afford.
There are more pressing concerns for her. Water is one.

“The doctor had advised me to purchase medicines, but if I have to spend `30-40 each day on water, how will I save money for medicines?” she asks.

Families here earn roughly `100-150 a day, but have to spend a substantial amount on water and kerosene. There is no water supply and they have to spend up to `30 for a 25-litre can. While Mumbai gets an average water supply of 200 litres per capita per day, the city’s slums get less than 90 litres.

Slums such as Rafi Nagar get nothing.
 
Given the lack of access to water and sanitation, morbidity is high—most children have diarrhoea or other infections. Diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections are the leading child killers worldwide. Malnourished children are more susceptible to such illnesses because they lack enough nutrients to fight infections.

Under-nutrition in Mumbai is a silent crisis. Most of the malnourished children in the nation’s financial capital are from its world-famous slums. A recent study by non-governmental organization (NGO) Dasra puts the number of malnutrition-related deaths in Mumbai’s slums at 26,000 per year, a figure the government disputes.

As the Mumbai human development report pointed out, there has been no change in the condition of slum-dwellers even though non-slum areas have seen an improvement in their lifestyles. “If anything has changed, it is the deterioration in health and sanitation conditions, and the increasing social trauma of visible inequity,” the report said.

While the government offers knee-jerk reactions to malnutrition, especially when deaths occur, there is no sustained effort. The state is loath to give “legal status” to slums like Rafi Nagar and provide basic amenities such as piped water and sewerage to slum-dwellers. After the Hindustan Times report was published, women and child development minister Varsha Gaikwad paid a visit to Rafi Nagar and on the same day, a third centre under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme started working.

India’s main nutrition programme, ICDS is the world’s oldest and largest child-services scheme, started in 1975 to tackle malnutrition and provide pre-school education to children younger than six years. In 2011-12, India will spend`10,330 crore on ICDS, a 17% rise from the previous year.
 
Seven months after Gaikwad visited Rafi Nagar, Sheikh’s two malnourished children bear testimony to the failures of ICDS and the fact that the visit made little difference to their lives.

In urban areas, it is difficult to combat malnutrition without the involvement of municipal authorities, responsible for health, sanitation and drinking water. Urban malnutrition is poised to become a growing issue: for the first time in India’s history, absolute growth in urban population has exceeded growth in rural areas, according to provisional census figures for 2011.
 
Urban planners seek to rein in growth by discouraging migration to the city by evicting squatters and denying them services, all of which ultimately proves futile.
 
Such efforts ignore the fact that most of the increase does not come from migration, but from more locals—they make up 65% of India’s urban population rise—and from the reclassification of many rural areas to urban.

While the poor nutritional status in slums underlines the divide in living conditions in cities and state apathy in providing basic public health, it also highlights the ineffectiveness of ICDS in tackling under-nutrition.

ICDS was conceived to cater to the needs of the rural population, but the scheme has been extended to urban areas in the past decade, where it is active mostly in slums.

Little attention to children below three years—a time when intervention is most effective—an over-ambitious design that tries to attempt too many things with too few resources, lack of community participation, and grossly inadequate training and compensation to anganwadi workers, have maimed the ability of ICDS to fight under-nutrition. ICDS works through the anganwadi centres. Nearly 1.2 million anganwadi workers or sevikas form India’s frontline nutritional workforce. ICDS offers a package of services: supplementary nutrition, nutrition and health education, health monitoring, and referrals for children below six years of age, adolescent girls and women. Pre-school non-formal education, growth monitoring and immunization against major diseases are services provided exclusively to children.

Given the range of roles an anganwadi worker is supposed to perform for `4,000 per month, she usually focuses mainly on the one where there is a semblance of monitoring—the distribution of food supplements. The scheme functions in typical bureaucratic style, with a centre-based approach and very little outreach. As long as survey forms and registers are filled, supplementary rations get delivered and distributed, no questions are asked.

“The ICDS Scheme has been reduced to a mere survey and there is very little service delivery,” says Sarath Chandran, convenor of Bandra-based NGO Centre for Right to Housing, which has voiced demands for new ICDS centres.

Even as a survey organization, it does a half-hearted job. In many anganwadi centres, there are no scales to weigh children. In others, only children who are able to come to the centre are weighed. Local communities are not involved in ICDS, and the anganwadi worker is usually from a different locality and often from a different community. While ICDS norms encourage the selection of anganwadi workers within the community, such norms are rarely followed in Mumbai.

In some cases, the divide between the anganwadi worker and the community she is supposed to serve, is widened by her prejudices. “If these people produce so many children, what can we do?” asks Sheila Godbole, an anganwadiworker in Indira Nagar. She argues that people in that slum do not care for their children and are not receptive to her suggestions, an argument repeated at other slums.

Faulty selection and inadequate training of anganwadi workers render them ineffective in educating parents, and there is very little change in food habits and feeding practices. Infrequent home visits and the lack of involvement of the community have ensured that nutrition and health education hardly receive any attention.

Mahendra Gaikwad, nodal officer in charge of ICDS in Mumbai, argues that nutrition education is not completely absent and they do organize a nutrition awareness week every year. Even that rarely involves outreach and mothers are expected to visit the anganwadi centre to learn about nutrition.

Several families with small children in Indira Nagar as well as Rafi Nagar said that anganwadi workers visited their homes only when they had to do a survey, which happens once in three months and sometimes not even then.

Although there is a norm that each anganwadi worker should visit five families a day, this is widely flouted. “Sometimes one, sometimes none”, is how it works, anganwadi supervisors say.

“The sevikas come to the centre, sit there between 11am and 1pm and leave,” says Nilofer Khan, another underweight woman with malnourished children in Rafi Nagar.
 
Little wonder then that children below three years, and pregnant and lactating mothers, who need attention most but are unable to come to the centre, miss out on ICDS services. Eighty-eight per cent of pregnant women and 92% of lactating mothers do not receive health check-ups from ICDS centres in India, according to National Family Health Survey data.

There is indeed a provision for take-home rations (THR) for children below three years, and for pregnant and lactating mothers. However, THR find little favour among the supposed beneficiaries and is government money (over`300 crore annually in Maharashtra) going down the drain—literally. In Indira Nagar, THR packets— sheera or upmapowder packed with micro-nutrients— blocked gutters on the day they were distributed, a local social worker says. Only one in 10 families use it, an anganwadi worker says. Unless ICDS is reworked to address the needs of slum-dwellers, and local authorities and urban planners change their attitude to them, the children of Rafi Nagar will continue to fall through the cracks of schemes meant to create an inclusive India.
 
The current attitude is exemplified by this: The only time municipal workers showed up in Rafi Nagar was just before the monsoon—to demolish 50 homes.

Live Mint, 14 October, 2011, http://www.livemint.com/2011/10/13202720/A-bad-return-on-investment.html?atype=tp


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