Make Children’s Dream Come True
By Sachin Kumar Jain
13 August, 2007
Countercurrents.orgEven after 60 years of independence, one can not have joyful celebration of Independence Day, remember 6 out of 10 children in Madhya Pradesh are malnourished and 7 out of 100 children under the age of one year die without enjoying their first birthday due to various causes. They can be survived, if we wish to save them. We here include Society, Political groups, State’ media and Judiciary. A dream of development that does not include children is a futile dream. Childhood is the foundation of physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of people. The first six years of life is a period of dramatic growth and development. Apart from rapid physical and mental growth, children do the difficult task of learning languages, an assortment of physical skills, values and other things required to lead a full life in this competitive world. Much of this cannot be achieved without sound nutrition, good health, appropriate education, love and affection.
Investing in the nutrition, health and education of the child under six is not only a moral duty of the government, but also a sound ‘business choice’ with high returns. Research across the world has established that it is either impossible or too costly to make a malnourished child a healthy adult. Minor investments in education of young child goes a long way to ensuring that the child finishes school and makes the best use of it. In failing to attend to the child the government has both been unjust and unwise. The approach paper for the eleventh plan grandly captioned as “Towards Faster and More Inclusive Growth” barely makes a lip service to early childhood (The most significant mention comes in Box 4 in page 47 of the document, “We aim to give the right start to children from 0-6 years with effective implementation of the ICDS programme”. Unfortunately, focus on early childhood begins and ends in this grand statement). This note is a call to sharply refocus the plan by giving due attention to children under six. The most important step in fulfilling our commitment to early childhood is to create a high quality ICDS that every child can access.
In the prevailing scenario, it requires re-framing of the policy, in its wider perspective, for succeeding in our objective to eradicate malnutrition from the society.The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) is an effort in the right direction having wide-ranging implications for overcoming the monstrous and dreaded problem of malnutrition among children. Only through health child-hood, between age group of 0 – 6 years, we can accelerate the process of development in its real sense. While the central theme of Integrated Child Development Scheme is providing of nutritious food to the children, but at the implementation stage, this very theme of ICDS is overlooked. Analysis reveals that all children up to six years of age are treated equally, while in fact the children up to two years of age require most tender, extensive and sensitive care in their upbringing and thus they have to be treated as separate and distinct category and be provided nutrients accordingly. This scientific fact appears to be have been totally ignored that the first two years of human life, as compared to other age groups, are most important for its vital mental development and any deficiency during this period have its life-long adverse affect. The nutrient requirement of a child, up to first six months, is to some extent, are met with the breast-feeding and as such, the nutrition needs of lactating mothers has to be taken care of so that they are able to feed their infants properly. But it did not happen and in the absence of any proper and required nutritious food, particularly during first six months of post natal care of mothers, they are not able to properly feed their infants and as such there was no appreciable reduction in the child-death rate of Madhya Pradesh. The micro-nutrient requirement of children between age group of 6 months and 2 years are simply ignored and they continued to be served with the same food as is provided to children up to six years of age – which obviously is more solid and difficult to digest for children up to 2 years of age. Thus it did not have the desired impact over the children in this tender age group.
Further, specific attention with alertness need to be provide both by Society as well as the concerned families to the children between age group of 2 and 6 years in terms of their nourishment. However, under the Integrated Child Development Scheme, provision of nutrition education to the respective parents and families has been rendered a mere formality. Ground level analysis reveals that workshops intended to provide capacity building trainings to Anganwadi workers have been totally ignored. Consequently, the door-to-door contacts with beneficiaries with a view to make them aware about the importance of nutritious food and health needs is not taking place in an effective manner.
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