Dreze report: TN's success versus UP's hungry kids

It is rice-dal and an egg a week for toddlers attending anganwadis in Tamil Nadu. In Uttar Pradesh, it is just a dry wheat mixture, day after day.

Tamil Nadu anganwadis feed children below six years round the year, provide immunisation, engage children in games. In Uttar Pradesh, supply of food in 60 per cent anganwadis is not regular while 25 per cent don't give food at all.

These are the findings of a six-state survey of anganwadis, called the FOCUS report, by activists and NGOs led by economist Jean Dreze and Shanta Sinha.

The centrally funded Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), which work through anganwadis, is the only national programme for children below the age of six. The report, released by economist Amartya Sen today, comes in the backdrop of a recent ruling of the Supreme Court seeking universalisation of anganwadis in two years.

The report also coincides with the third National Family Health Survey, which has found no decline in the number of malnourished children below the age of six in the past eight years. The figure remains at 45 per cent.

As Shanta Sinha, a co-author of the report said, "Survival of a child in this country is an accident. There is no guarantee of life, of food, or anything. It is an incomplete democracy."

The FOCUS report find success stories in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, while the performance of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh is average. In the three northern states, 13 per cent anganwadis failed to provide food. This figure was 9 per cent in Maharashtra.

While people in all the four northern states rated their anganwadis as very poor, 60 per cent in Maharashtra and 52 per cent in Tamil Nadu gave good marks to anganwadi workers.

The bad report card in Uttar Pradesh blends with the stark figures of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS).

For instance, the number of infant mortality cases in the state has gone up from the previous survey It is 64 deaths per 1,000 in urban areas. This was 63 in the previous survey. The percentage of severely malnourished children has gone up from 11 to 14.