analysis

Updated: Oct 05, 2017 11:42 IST

One of the greatest paradoxes of India’s growth story is that it co-exists with unconscionably high levels of child malnutrition. The latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) found an unconscionably high percentage (38%) of children stunted and underweight (36%). A significant part of malnutrition sets in during early childhood, and its damage to body and brain is irreversible.

For more than 40 years, governments have intervened with food transfers in pre-school Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres. These infant food transfers were mandated as legal rights first by the Supreme Court and then by the National Food Security Act 2013.

However a recent decision of the Centre threatens to inflict a body blow to this nutritional lifeline to India’s poorest children. This is by substituting these with either cash or packaged food. It is argued that these would eliminate inefficiencies, leakages and corruption.

There is, however, no evidence that cash transfers are more efficient or less prone to diversion than transfers of food. As special commissioner for the Supreme Court in the Right to Food case for over a decade and a half, I found that social protection programmes based exclusively on cash transfers like pensions were at least as vulnerable to dishonesty and pilfering as food transfer programmes such as the public distribution system and ICDS.

But converting children’s food supplies into cash carries many other dangers. International research shows that decisions about cash tend to be made by men in a family. There is little guarantee that men will spend the cash transferred to the family on nutrition for the young child. Cash is also vulnerable to inflation, whereas food transfers are inflation-proof.

The Right to Food Campaign also argues in an open letter to the prime minister that “food distribution plays a critical role in attracting women and children to the anganwadi and ensuring that they receive other essential services related to growth monitoring, nutrition counselling, ante-natal care etc. Research also shows that the feeding programmes of the ICDS benefit girls and children from marginalised families more and that they have a positive effect on heights of 0-2 year olds”.

Moreover small children of different castes and religions, as well as disabled and other children eating together, also extends social education of equality and fraternity to these children at impressionable early years of life.

The case for substituting hot cooked meals in the ICDS centre with packaged food is equally flawed. Once again, the argument of the government is that this will both ensure less corruption and higher micro-nutrient provisioning to the children. Behind the demand for packaged food is likely to be large for-profit private companies. Far from eliminating corruption, their entry would only facilitate the centralisation of this corruption to high levels of decision-making, those which would award the contracts in national and state capitals.

Recognising this danger, the Supreme Court consistently barred the entry of private suppliers into the supply of supplementary nutrition to children, and instead mandated provisioning by self-help groups of women or mothers’ committees. It cannot be our case that these are also not prone to corruption. But these are at least much more subject to local community scrutiny and accountability, and it is much harder for a committee of mothers to steal from their own children.

Supplying hot cooked meals can also have other favourable potential spin-offs, if the programme is suitably designed, such as ensuring employment to local woman, and spurring the local food economy.

This still leaves the argument that food for poor children needs to be scientifically packaged with a careful balance of micro-nutrients. Most persons who make this argument would in their own homes be unwilling to substitute milk, eggs and other culturally appropriate food with packaged mixes for their own children and grandchildren. Many nutritionists argue that the best guarantee for a young child’s nutrition is fresh, balanced, hot-cooked culturally appropriate food. If research establishes that particular diets in certain regions lack specific micro-nutrients, then these alone could be supplied to augment (and not substitute) the hot cooked meals.

Some states have successfully experimented by adding eggs and milk to these, and this indeed is the path down which the government should move. Instead, by converting locally produced food into cash or packaged food prepared by high-end factories, the government will not benefit impoverished children. It will instead advantage large multi-national food companies, and reduce further governments’ welfare spending.

Every third malnourished child in the world is Indian. Every third child in India is malnourished. They deserve much better from their governments than escape paths to the central duty of a caring state to ensure adequate nutritious food in their bellies.

Harsh Mander is author, Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India

The views expressed are personal