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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Muddled nutrition in Delhi ends up in PIL

Muddled nutrition in Delhi ends up in PIL

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published Published on Jul 11, 2017   modified Modified on Jul 11, 2017
-CivilSocietyOnline.com

New Delhi: An estimated 50 percent of children in the National Capital Territory of Delhi are undernourished, but a State Food Commission that can address the problem has not been set up.

The Food Security Act of 2013 stipulates the setting up of food commissions in the states to monitor mid-day meals served in government schools and supplementary nutrition provided in anganwadis, which are mother and child care centres.

It has been more than three years since the enactment of the law, but the state government is yet to appoint a commission even though malnourishment in Delhi is well documented and it is also established that mid-day meals served in schools and anganwadis are of poor quality.

The law seeks to ensure, among many other things, that children from poor homes get at least one good hot meal in a day so that their growth and development is not impeded.

A public interest litigation (PIL) has now been filed in Delhi High Court by Matri Sudha, an NGO involved in child welfare and maternal health.

Matri Sudha wants the High Court to direct the government to set up the State Food Commission without which it won’t be possible to deploy expertise and coordinate the work of various arms of the government to bring about a significant improvement in nutritional levels.

The commission is the pivot of the food security law and in its absence, there is no means of evaluating nutritional security nor is it possible to address complaints regarding violation of entitlements.

The law bestows on the commission several crucial functions to deal with the prevention and management of child malnutrition. It is supposed to identify households eligible for foodgrains at subsidised prices. It is expected to make sure that nutritional support reaches pregnant women, lactating mothers and children between the ages of six and 14.

The PIL, which has been filed through advocate Vikram Srivastava, says that in the absence of a State Food Commission, there is a vacuum in monitoring and evaluating the malnutrition situation in Delhi.

Since the Food Security Act is meant to specifically benefit the poor and disempowered, there is no alternative to enforcement of the law by the government.

At Rs 25,000 a month, Delhi has the highest per capita income in the country. Its GDP growth rate is 8.8 percent. But these levels of prosperity do not counterbalance malnutrition and anaemia among children and mothers.

No political party has seriously addressed the problem. It hasn’t figured in election manifestos. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government has inherited it as a legacy of previous Congress regimes. But despite being three years in power, AAP hasn’t acted either.

A free-for-all kind of situation exists with no regulation over quality of meals and credentials of suppliers. There appears to be no coordination between departments.  The result is malnutrition has gone up by one percent from 26.1 in 2005-6 to 27 percent in 2016-17.

The need for an accountable system is underlined by the scale of the demand. Roughly 30 percent of Delhi’s population exists in slums. On record, there are 1.2 million children who avail of mid-day meal schemes in Delhi government schools. There are 840,000 beneficiaries of supplementary nutrition at anganwadis. This number is lower than the 1.7 million who were getting supplementary nutrition in 2012, which is strange because the number of anganwadis actually went up from 10,607 to 10,897 over the same period.

It is not clear why the State Food Commission has not been set up. Applications made by Matri Sudha under the Right to Information (RTI) Act have elicited confused responses from the state government.

For instance, the government at one stage said that the State Grievances Commission would serve as the State Food Commission. Under the law the government can designate an existing commission to do the job, but using the State Grievances Commission was not a workable idea because it had only two members and no chairman. Moreover, it has no expertise or machinery for dealing with the issues pertaining to child malnutrition.

The government’s answer to the latest RTI application by Matri Sudha is that the setting up of a commission is under consideration.

Please click here to read more.

CivilSocietyOnline.com, July, 2017, http://www.civilsocietyonline.com/governance/muddled-nutrition-in-delhi/


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