dna edit: Let's debate malnourishment

Juggling statistics to suit a politically expedient argument is child’s play in contemporary politics. Politicians have made a game of throwing statistics at each other on every contested subject — from violence to hunger and malnourishment. This competitive number crunching tends to get frenetic in the election season — a phenomenon currently in evidence with the approaching assembly and Parliament elections. Currently topping the list of such passionately debated subjects: malnourishment in Gujarat. The latest Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report adds further grist to the oft-repeated allegation that the Gujarat model of governance — touted as exemplary by Narendra Modi — has abjectly failed in checking malnourishment.  

Despite the government’s claim of “providing supplementary nutrition to the targeted children between the year 2007 and 2012,” the monthly progress report as on March 2012 states that every third child was underweight. The auditor points out that as opposed to 75,480 anganwadi centres needed in the State, only 52,137 had been sanctioned and only 50,225 were functional. Nearly 1.87 crore people had been deprived of the benefits of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Even by the Gujarat government’s own admission there are at least 6.13 lakh malnourished children spread over 14 districts.

Even as the latest corroboration of Gujarat’s widespread malnourishment has the opposition rubbing its hands in glee, larger questions remain: why is an issue as gravely shameful as malnourishment never a political and electoral talking point? Why does it not find a place in electoral campaigns except in trite point-scoring by competing political parties? Few would dispute that the recent focus on malnourishment has been impelled not by any genuine transformation of political discourse — or intense soul searching by politicians — but by a growing anxiety about Narendra Modi’s rising popularity.

If malnourishment has come into focus at all — it’s only come inadvertently and not as a stand-alone subject of importance that politicians have placed at the top of their governance priorities. For instance, the recent row between Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen over competing development models — has pitchforked malnourishment at the centre of an intense even if acrimonious, national debate.

As for politicians, they have intermittently paid lip-service to hunger. That despite the ICDS, launched 38 years ago, the situation on the ground remains bleak, is a sad commentary on our governing elite. Last January, launching a scheme on malnourishment Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said,  “Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high.” Words of good intent not translated into remedial action. According to the 2011 Hunger and Malnutrition survey, 42 per cent of children less than five years old are underweight — almost double the rate of sub-Saharan Africa — meaning that nearly every second child in India suffers malnutrition and hunger.

Narendra Modi’s Gujarat may be under severe scrutiny, not least because an inert Congress, the primary opposition party, has found malnourishment a useful weapon to beat its adversary with.
But how has the Congress itself fared on this count? The situation is hardly laudatory in states ruled by the Congress or the regional parties.

If the political class is serious about addressing malnourishment, they must focus on the issue in their forthcoming election campaigns — not as part of the usual oppose-Modi, point-scoring strategy — but, an independent issue deserving of as much if not more attention than economic policies like retail FDI.