Make
Children’s Dream Come True
By Sachin Kumar Jain
13 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Even
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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