The high court has also taken note of child malnutrition deaths in Nashik district.
There are 14,500 malnourished children in the tribal areas of Melghat, is what the state government informed the Bombay High Court on Thursday. The court has directed the newly-appointed IAS officer Pradeep P, who will act as the project officer coordinating among nine government departments to work closely with the Self Help Groups (SHO) and NGO’s working in the area, to turn around the situation.
A division bench of Chief Justice Mohit Shah and Justice DY Chandrachud, said “The entire exercise which is going on for the last several months is to ensure that you don’t frame policies on paper but also implement them and the benefit is passed on to the needy.”
The bench directed the nodal officer to implement the court previous order of May 4, directing the state to establish malnourishment on the basis of Weight is to Age and not Weight it to Height. The officer was also told to provide cooked food to the children instead of giving ration to take home.
The bench observed “We won’t take you to task if you implement our earlier order. We want to see result not only paper work.”
The nodal officer prayed before the court that may allow restarting the take away ration scheme instead of providing cooked food to the children. He claimed that there is a difficulty as not many Self Help groups are supporting and coming forward to cook the food and distribute it.
However, petitioner Purnima Upadhyay of the NGO Khoj said that “I have several SHO who are ready to assist the officials and will provide the details of them to the nodal officer.”
Advocate Gayatri Singh who appears as amicus curie in the petition handed down newspaper clipping of a city tabloid which had carried out series of articles on malnutrition prevailing in Nashik District.
The high court suo-moto converted them into a petition and issued a notice to the various government departments asking a reply as to why a nodal officer was not appointed in these areas to deal with the problem. The court has now adjourned the hearing till September 30.
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