‘Panjiri mafia’ and hungry kids

Pradeep Kapoor Azamgarh, UP

The Supreme Court had given directives that each child up to six years of age should be fed six to10 grams of protein and 300 calories of panjiri (nutritional food) everyday. Are the Supreme Court directives to provide adequate food to children being followed by the Child Welfare and Nutrition Department of the UP government?

One look at the 132 malnourished children under six years in Jokhara village in Azamgarh will make it clear how poor children have been left to die by successive regimes. The Child Welfare Scheme has been implemented in this village since 1996 and three anganwadi centres are working. But the benefits have not reached at least 133 of the 138 children who are under six years of age.

Who is responsible for this miserable state of affairs?

The majority of parents belong to the 25-30 age-group while the number of parents over 40 is only four in this village. The socio-economic status of the village revealed that 64 parents are labourers, 44 are dependent on agriculture and 48 are agricultural labourers. Ten are doing private jobs, two are carpenters and two rickshaw-pullers. Only nine were in government service and eight were self-employed. They all have one thing in common — severe malnutrition among their children.

Ninety-one families in the village have pucca homes, 78 have bicycles, 61 have fans, 73 have access to electricity, 46 are living in kachcha homes, 46 have televisions and 14 have gas connections. Two families have installed computers.

Although in operation since 1996, the village anganwadi centre had no record of vaccination of 198 children. Many were vaccinated, but the entire cycle could not be completed. As per the Child Welfare and Nutrition Department directives, it is mandatory that each child under six should be registered with the anganwadi centres. In this village, however, only 37 children were going to such centres. Of those 37, only 20 were getting nutritious food approved by the Supreme Court. Clearly, there is no proper distribution of panjiri and nourishing food in the village.

The fact is, with or without the agnanwadi centres, children are suffering from malnutrition, defeating the very purpose for which such centres were set up. Even nutritional food of 300 calories to each child is not sufficient to stop widespread malnutrition. The weight chart of 190 children showed that only 30 children fell in the general category while 138 children were found to be suffering from grade one to grade four malnutrition. This means 70 per cent of the children in this village suffer from malnutrition — 20 per cent higher than the state average of 50 per cent.

The gram pradhan and other villagers do not seem to be aware of the seriousness of the situation. No steps have been taken to send those suffering children who are in grade three and four to nearby town Azamgarh for better treatment, even though 22 children have been suffering from diarrhoea for the last six months. Anganwadi workers told Hardnews that the panjiri given to them for distribution to children was so bad that it caused several cases of diarrhoea among the children. They added that the majority of the anganwadi centres were extremely unhygienic and no mother wants to send her children there.

“In some places, there is no building at all and we are supposed to operate in an open space with no protection,” anganwadi workers from Kheri complained. “We have not been given chalks or a blackboard to teach children despite repeated complaints to district project officers.”

Former secretary of child and women welfare, Balwinder Kumar, had admitted last year that they had received complaints about the panjiri; it was so bad that it was being fed to animals. He had admitted to the presence of a 'panjiri mafia', which controlled distribution to the poor people. Kumar had ordered that committees be constituted to monitor the distribution of panjiri in each village. But the criminal nexus allegedly saw to it that such moves are decisively scuttled.

According to recent survey done by the National Institute of Nutrition in collaboration with the Institute of Applied Statistics and Development Studies, Lucknow, UP has the highest infant mortality rate (IMR) at 72/1000 live births and 52 per cent of children under age of three years were undernourished. UP 'scores' 28 per cent of under-five deaths in the country.