How does one treat a malnourished child? Common sense suggests a proper meal. Not good enough, says the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development. Its prescription is supplying an 80-g ready-to-eat dosage of 10 minerals and vitamins in specific proportions, besides proteins and carbohydrates. In other words, just pop a pill or munch a biscuit for your meal--no fussing about cooking and cleaning dishes. Taste? The child will acquire it; it's fun food.
Nutritionists and most people associated with planning and monitoring the ministry's Integrated Child Development Services (icds) find this approach distasteful. They see in it a move to serve the scheme on a platter to private contractors and the food industry eager to pry open rural markets. As if to confirm their fears, Renuka Chowdhury, union minister of state for women and child development, proposed public-private partnership in the icds scheme last month."If contractors are allowed, corruption will increase. If it is just 50 per cent at present, it is likely to become 90 per cent," says N C Saxena, food commissioner the supreme court appointed to monitor the governments' food and nutrition schemes. Chowdhury also wants centre to have a greater say in the state-implemented scheme.
icds aims to provide the right supplementary nutrition to children in the age group of 6 months to six years and is the world's biggest such scheme, covering 58 million children. Over a hundred million children are waiting for the scheme to reach them. But despite the centre having spent Rs 5,000 crore under the scheme in 2007-08, half the children in India under the age of five are still severely malnourished. The draft eleventh Five Year Plan has now allocated Rs 52,000 crore (or a little more than Rs 10,000 crore a year) for the scheme. Although the stress is on providing hot cooked food through anganwadis and self-help groups, the size and budget of the scheme make it lucrative to private players.
Contractors are hungry, too Until 2006 the supplementary nutrition programme (snp) of icds was completely state-funded, and each state's secretary to the department of women and child development would invite tenders for contracts to procure and supply food, especially for younger children. "The fact that these contracts are often sizeable--ranging between Rs 25 crore and Rs 250 crore--makes them prone to corruption. Over time tenders for these contracts have been drawn to favour key players (contractors) and irregularities remain the norm rather than the exception," states the 2006 Focus Report prepared by food commissioners (see box Contractor system the rot within).
In 2004, the supreme court banned contractors from supplying food to anganwadis under icds, but barely six states complied. The ruling came in the right-to-food case filed by the activist group People's Union for Civil Liberties in 2001. Chief secretaries of several states have appeared before the court for violation of the law. Uttar Pradesh invited tenders for contracts after the 2004 order and the contracts extend up to 2010. On December 13, 2006, the apex court ordered chief secretaries of states and union territories to submit affidavits giving details of the steps taken towards complying with its 2004 orders. It also told chief secretaries to give a timeframe within which decentralization of the supply of food under snp would be completed. Yet Uttar Pradesh invited tenders in January 2007, though the bids have not been opened. Santosh Mehrotra, principal adviser to the planning commission, says if states introduce contracts now, the chief secretaries might go to jail for contempt of court.
Such is the stranglehold of contractors that food commissioners in their December 2007 report pointed out that nine states and union territories still used private traders. Some states have come up with clever ways of bypassing court orders. Chhattisgarh calls its contractors "manufacturers" and Maharashtra, while ordering removal of contractors and handing over of snp to mahila mandals and self-help groups, inserted a clause allowing cooperative federations to supply in areas where such organizations were not present. Since federations source all the supplies through private traders, this allowed contractors a back door entry to the icds system. The matter is in court.
In September last year, food commissioners Saxena and Harsh Mander wrote to the prime minister that the "entire feeding programme was riddled with corruption and leakages since the supply of food, the ready to eat food powders, had passed into the hands of private contractors. Not only were these calorifically inadequate and culturally inappropriate, most of the time they never even reached the beneficiaries".
