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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Food Bill skips malnutrition, anaemia as ministries differ by Sreelatha Menon

The Food Security Bill, approved by a group of ministers this month, has ignored malnutrition as a subject, surprising many observers in UN bodies. The reason given is a turf war among different central ministries.

According to N C Saxena, a member of the National Advisory Council that has opposed the government’s draft of the Bill, the women and child development ministry was against including the subject in the Bill as it was in its domain.

The ministry also said it had nothing to say about the Food Security Bill, as it came under the ambit of the food ministry.
 
FACT FILE

Anaemia   NFHS 2    NFHS 3

Kids      74.2      78.9
(6-35 months)

Women     51.8      56.2
(15-49 years)

Pregnant  49.7      57.9  
women     

Men        na       24.3

Kids under 3 years

Stunted   51.0      44.9

Under     42.7      40.4   
weight  

Body Mass Index

Women     36.0      33.0

Men       na        28.1   

All figures in percentage

The Bill has been drafted by the food ministry with suggestions from NAC, and since nutrition is an issue not addressed by the ministry, it was left out. Similarly, though the grouse of one of the NAC members, M S Swaminathan, has been the total exclusion of agricultural production from the Bill that talks of food security, agriculture comes under the agriculture ministry. Hence the result is a Bill that only covers the territory marked for the food ministry — the public distribution system (PDS). The Bill, which will soon go to the Cabinet for approval, has restricted the meaning of food to food grains. Thus, it has confined its objective to removing hunger though two successive National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) done in the past decade have established malnutrition and anaemia as two chronic problems in the country, responsible for the spiraling mortality and morbidity rates among children below six years and mothers.

According to the findings of NFHS-3 of 2005-06, almost 80 per cent of the children below three years and about 56 per cent of women are anaemic. The case of stunted and underweight growth among the children is also common, showing little improvement from the previous survey of 1998-99. Up to 44 per cent of children below three years are underweight or stunted, while about 33 per cent of adult women have a below-normal body mass index, all signals to a rampant maternal and child mortality.

An expert in the Nutrition Foundation of India, a non-profit research body, says the Bill seems to be placed in the context of the famine in the early 20th century rather than now when malnutrition is the main concern. It looks at the starvation scenario rather than malnutrition, the expert said, without wanting to be named. What the Bill should have ensured was sufficient production of pulses to meet the protein needs of the country and also ensuring that vegetable production was promoted for domestic consumption, the expert added.

Gawin Wall, the India representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, had in an interview to Business standard expressed regret at nutrition being totally left out of the food security Bill. “We hope it would be addressed eventually,” he had said. Nutrition means ensuring access to dairy products, vegetables as well as proteins and cereals. Providing cereals alone cannot address nutrition issues, he said.

Says Ashwini Kumar, a development scholar with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences: “It is underweight and stunted parents who give birth to underweight babies. The authors of the Bill obviously did not think of nutrition.”

However, to be fair to the NAC members, there were proposals for inclusion of pulses and oil in the food supplied. The component of millets was also the result of a concern for nutrition. However, when NAC finalised its document, these elements except millets were dropped.

So, the food ministry did not have to eliminate much except the malnutrition treatment and prevention programme suggested by NAC.

Food Minister K V Thomas says the matter was as simple as providing for hunger and letting states take care of nutrition in their own ways.