New Delhi: Two out of three children from poor families in India are being ignored by a programme that seeks to provide them supplementary nutrition, a report by a committee appointed by the Supreme Court has said.
While some people blame the state governments for this—the Centre puts up 50% of the funds required for the programme and the states put up the rest—others blame the scheme’s structuring and implementation. The states, it emerges, are not always willing to pay their share, and, so, the utilization of funds for the so-called Supplementary Nutrition Provision (SNP) programme is as low as 25% in some states.
Since the Centre meets its share of the funding, and since states can avail only that proportion of Central funding that they have matched, a 25% utilization means that the states meet only one-fourth of their obligation. The national average is around 50%, which means the states meet half their obligation.
The seventh report of the Commissioners of the Supreme Court, a body set up by the country’s apex court in 2003 while hearing a public interest litigation on right to food filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a civil rights activist group, said that while there were 160 million children sought to be covered by the SNP programme, only 58 million are “SNP beneficiaries.” The SNP programme is part of the integrated child development schemes, one of the government’s flagship development initiatives.
The report by the commissioners—N.C. Saxena and Harsh Mander, both former bureaucrats—lists the compliance of the Centre and the states to the SNP programme.
According to Saxena, the poorest compliance is in states that need the programme the most: “25% of India’s districts are responsible for more than 50% of malnourished children, and these districts are mostly located in the poorer states. Yet, the poorest states and those with the highest levels of under-nutrition have the lowest levels of programme funding, supervisory staff, capacity to utilize funds and monitor progress, resulting in poor outcomes.”
ICDS is the only nation-wide scheme that focuses on the nutrition requirement, immunization and early education needs of the most vulnerable sections of the population—children under six years of age, pregnant and lactating mothers, and adolescent girls.
However, the last national family health survey shows there hasn’t been noticeable improvement in the nutritional status of children in the past eight years. Between 1998-99 and 2005-06, the percentage of underweight children under the age of 3 decreased by a mere percentage point, from 47% to 46%. While no data on population growth in this period is available, it is likely that the number of children in this age group actually increased in this period.