Panel throws out scheme to check malnutrition

Plan panel rejects WCD ministry’s R2 lakh cr proposal, says model is not implementable. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 13, 2012, 24:36:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Country’s top advisory body, the Planning Commission has rejected a Rs 2 lakh crore scheme aimed at checking malnutrition among children saying the model proposed was not implementable.

Around 46% of children in India are malnourished, a percentage even worse than sub-saharan Africa.

Recently, PM Manmohan Singh had also called malnourishment among children in India a matter of ‘shame’.

The problem of malnourishment begins from a mother’s womb because of poor health during pregnancy and in the first two years of a child’s life due to a nutrition-deficient diet.

According to the National Family Health Survey-III, Around 30% women aged 25-49 years give birth for the first time before the age of 18 years and 50% give birth for the first time at the age of 20. Around 1.7 million children die before their first birthday, of these 1.2 million die in the first month, the survey said.

To provide an incentive for mothers to delay their first pregnancy (after a woman turns 19) and improve health of the newborn, the women and child development (WCD) ministry had implemented a scheme to provide conditional cash to pregnant and lactating mothers who adopt good health practices.

Each mother in 52 districts was given Rs 4,000 from third trimester till the child was six months old to compensate for any wage loss, pay for medicines and ensure six months of exclusive breastfeeding. The money was given in three installments — at the time of registration of pregnancy, at the time of birth and when the baby completes six months.

The ministry wanted to extend it across India at a cost of around Rs 2 lakh crore in the next five years. Some others components were also merged to provide “single window” assistance to women through 14 lakh anganwadi centres.

But the plan panel believes the model of implementation was not workable. “The anganwadi centres do not have paraphernalia to implement such a massive scheme. For an anganwadi worker it will not be possible to monitor so many pregnant women along with running the centre,” a senior plan panel official said, adding that the ministry has been asked to suggest a more “innovative model”.

The decision has irked WCD minister Krishna Tirath, who met the commission’s deputy chief Montek Singh Ahluwalia this week. But Ahluwalia asked the ministry to submit a reworked proposal. Funds for any programme is not released until the panel approves it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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