A study conducted by Child Rights and You (CRY) has found that 41% of children living in Mumbai slums are underweight and 71% are suffering from stunting problem, which is usually associated with malnutrition.
The study was conducted across 15 slums of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata and had a sample size of 1,260. The focus of the study was to find out if children living in slums of metro cities are getting a healthy start. According to the findings, 56% of the underweight children in Mumbai's slums were found to be in severe acute malnutrition category.
"Nutrition and immunisation are the most critical for a child's survival in the first six years of his or her life. Shockingly, even the immunisation coverage in Mumbai slums is much worse than expected. Only half of the children, 49% under the age of three years, have received any vaccination at all (at least one vaccine)," said Kreeanne Rabadi, Regional Director (West) for CRY.
An indicator that substantiates the gap between the service and the community is the fact that though growth monitoring was done for 70% of children only 48% of parents were informed.
The study also revealed that 62% of parents were not informed by anganwadis that their child is malnourished. Only 49% children in Mumbai slums are enrolled in anganwadis.
Dr Alka Jadhav, professor of pediatrics at Sion Hospital, said that a demographic transformation is moving the problem of hunger and under nutrition to urban areas. "Mumbai, the state capital, is the epicentre of urbanisation in India. In Mumbai, 56% of households are located in areas designated by the census as 'slums'. Under nutrition among slum-dwelling children in Mumbai is pervasive as 16% of under-fives are wasted, 36% are underweight, and 47% are stunted. (NFHS-3)," said Dr Jadhav.
Dr Ashok Rathod, head of the paediatrics, JJ Hospital, said, "Malnutrition cases have gone up as we are now following World Health Organisation's standards. But in the last 10 years, the management of malnutrition cases has improved." He added that although the government has been doing its best in ensuring better management of malnourished children, there should be some supervision on the role of anganwadis in the same.
According to the CRY study, 71% of children like to go anganwadis (AWC) and 93% of parents feel safe in sending their child to AWCs. However, only 72.9% AWC/preschools have sufficient space for preschool education sessions. Interestingly, 98.1% of AWC/preschools in Mumbai have child-friendly environment for children below the age of 6 years. However, only 36% of parents in Mumbai said that AWCs do regular growth monitoring of their children.
The use of toys and recreational material in anganwadis is 84.2% in Mumbai. Similarly, the use of teaching learning material in Mumbai is 74% in anganwadis and reading writing and number activities is 79%.
Swati Popat Vats, president, Early Childhood Association, said, "I agree with the study that most of the anganwadis are in very small places. They don't have fixed structure. Hygeine of toilets is very poor in AWCs. The growth monitoring is also poor because the teachers in AWCs are not trained properly. The ministry of women and child development has framed the early childhood education policy but the states are yet to implement it."
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