Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Food for thought' that was published in Newsband

Food for thought

Hot-cooked meals is the solution to poor child nutrition. The idea behind improving maternal and child nutrition is that early childhood is the foundation for the health and well-being of an individual. The national programme of providing hot-cooked meals to children three to six years old, and take-home rations for younger children and pregnant and lactating mothers is great. Attempts to substitute meals or rations with factory-made nutrients will only inject commercialization and upset the nutritional basis of the scheme.

The newly-formed inter-ministerial National Council on India’s Nutrition Challenges has chosen to continue the current practice. Providing more nutritious hot-cooked meals and rations with the help of local self-help groups is to be welcomed. There should be focus on the provision of physical infrastructure and funding, besides closer monitoring of the nutrition mission. Theoretically, the mission covers every child, but in practice it is not accessible to all.

According to a survey, an estimated 35.7% children are underweight and 38.4% are stunted in that age group. The body mass index of 22.9% women aged 15-49 indicates chronic energy deficiency. These figures should cause alarm. One should rigorously measure levels of access and quality of nutrition, and publish the data periodically. Another survey indicates that acute malnutrition levels of about 25% in some States.

This is very much true that factory made food will lead to commercialisation in this noble scheme. It will lead to raising of the budget of the scheme. Tendering for such meal supply will lead to monopoly of a particular brand and it will lead towards corruption. In recent there was so many cases of use of harmful chemicals in packaged food. So, it is recommended to stand with old scheme of hot cooked meal.

The question is why does the scheme for proper nutrition delivery to every child and women fail? The bureaucrats come up with superb ideas and solutions for problems on all socially relevant issues and yet we are not able to deliver the fruits of those schemes, in majority of cases, to those who need it the most. Whether the ICDS scheme and POSHAN Abhiyan are able to achieve the major goals with which they have been tasked with, is what remains to be seen in near future. Policy paralysis in implementation of schemes is the root of all important problems today.

Commercialisation of nutrition scheme to poor school children will not only deteriorate their health conditions but also there will be drop of children going to school due to sickness. How can we achieve such a goal while there are people working for Anganwadi who are there simply to get benefit from government instead of being an agent for child nutritional services. They take this as conventional.Government need to check up the working condition seriouly especially those of rural areas.

Government's most programmes are badly flawed when implementation comes into picture, no matter how robust and well-intended these are. The flagship programme of the government, midday meal scheme, is no exception here. All are being benefited from the scheme except the school children, the target of the scheme be it School administration, local village committee which is supposed to monitor the scheme and other administration at different levels. There is urgent need to introspection for the government of the day, in particular and for people in general.

The ICDS was launched in early nineteen eighties with much fanfare to address the issue of mal nutrition in pre-school going children and it also aimed at helping pregnant and lactating mothers by providing medical care and nutrition to them. As in case of most of such schemes, the actual problem is in half-hearted and faulty implementation. This scheme has not served its purpose. Most of these centres particularly in northern India function on paper only and remain closed for most part the year. The nutrition items are generally misappropriated by the anganwadi workers and officials of the department. In such a case scenario it would be better to transfer money to the deserving families directly rather than wasting it on procurement of nutrition items.