Babies are dying in Maharashtra too

In Kolkata, children dying in a city hospital made news. In Maharashtra this is an annual tragedy — only these children die in rural ar...

In Kolkata, children dying in a city hospital made news. In Maharashtra this is an annual tragedy — only these children die in rural areas and in so-called primary health centres. The numbers are shockingly high: 494 this year in Mumbai’s backyard — in places like Melghat, Amravati, Nandurbar, Nashik and even Thane. But the government, which has just set up a child rights commission with great fanfare, claims that these deaths are not malnutrition-related.

I recently visited the women and child, tribal welfare, public health, food and civil supplies departments in Mumbai and one only got the ‘we are not responsible’ response. Rewind to Nandurbar in Nasik last year. The number of child deaths there varied depending on whether the source was the media, the government, or an NGO. But what was clear, was that several such deaths had gone unreported.

When a Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) team fanned out deep inside Nandurbar, they found six villages with 57 per cent deaths unreported. They pegged malnutrition here at over 70 per cent, and discovered 78 per cent households with a food deficit for six months.

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Take the case of Jawhar. Malnutrition-related deaths have been reported from Jawhar in Thane district since April. Yet, Jawhar has a special scheme for providing nutritional supplements for pregnant tribal women. A princely sum of Rs 272 lakh was budgeted for this purpose. The money should have translated into something like Rs 800 per woman. But as the TRTI inquiry proved, there was a swindle up to Rs 70 lakh for the year 2000-01.

With such lackadaisical administration and such widespread corruption, is it any wonder then that widespread child deaths continue to stalk the state?

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