When just food isn8217;t enough

NEW DELHI, SEP 29: While the mid-term review of the Planning Commission has thrown up some horrifying numbers on the leakages and ineffect...

NEW DELHI, SEP 29: While the mid-term review of the Planning Commission has thrown up some horrifying numbers on the leakages and ineffectiveness of the anti-poverty schemes in the country, some even more frightening facts have been omitted from the final document that is to be presented to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee tomorrow.

While the vast majority of Indians over 95 per cent do get two square meals a day, the less said about its adequacy and quality the better. Just under three-fourths of children under the age of three in India suffer from anaemia arising out of iron deficiency in the blood. In rural India, 75.3 per cent of these children under the age of three are ananemic and in urban India, the figure stands at 70.8 per cent. Sixty-five per cent of these children are also under-nourished if you go by the normal weight prescribed by doctors.

These startling facts are part of the National Family Health Survey-II carried out during 1998-99, which is still being given the final touches, that being the apparent reason for excluding these facts in the mid-term review.

The National Nutrition Goals set in 1993 under the National Plan of Action on Nutrition NPAN were aimed at reducing moderate and severe malnutrition in pre-school children by half by the year 2000. But the story given by the NFHS-II is far off this mark. From 53.4 per cent of pre-school children being moderately to severely under-nourished, the reduction in this figure till 1998-99 was a mere 6.7 per cent.

Similarly, while the target was to reduce the incidence of underweight newborns to less than 10 per cent by the year 2000, the actual figure is still just under 45 per cent.

All this when the Government spends huge amounts on various nutrition schemes 8212; not to mention the running of the Public Distribution System PDScosting Rs 12,000 crore in subsidies every year 8212; to provide foodgrains at concessional rates to the people. Apart from the outlays for the PDS, an additional outlay of Rs 3,700 crore was made for supplementary nutrition schemes to achieve the NPAN goals in the Ninth Plan 1997-2002.

The anaemia story is not much better in the case of married women 8212; 52 per cent of those between 15 and 45 are anaemic. The NPAN goal stated that anaemia in pregnant women should be reduced to less than 25 per cent by 2000. In 1999, this figure stood at 82.4 per cent.

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And if you think the figures are skewed because of some low-performing states, the data tells an equally horrifying story of standards in the so-called progressive 8220;cyber8221; states: 72.3 per cent children below the age of three suffer from anaemia in Chandrababu Naidu8217;s Andhra Pradesh while 70.6 per cent children in this age group in Karnataka also suffer from anaemia. Not far behind are Delhi 8212; with 69 per cent children in this age group suffering from the disease 8212; 82.3 per cent in Rajasthan, 81.3 in Bihar, 80 per cent in Punjab, 78.3 in West Begal, 76 per cent in Maharashtra, 74.5 per cent in Gujarat and 73.9 per cent in Uttar Pradesh.

In the case of married women in the age group of 15-45 years, the story is just as depressing. Nearly 50 per cent women in Andhra Pradesh suffer from anaemia, 42.4 per cent in Karnataka, 62.7 per cent in West Bengal, 63.4 in Bihar and 48.7 per cent in UP and 41.4 per cent in Punjab.