Our permanently stunted children

A pet theme of Bollywood’s separated-at-birth plots is of the one brother who grows up to be a good cop, and the other an underworld criminal. The reality couldn’t be more distant from this lost-and-found pop fantasy. For instance, if they happened to be born around the villages of Muzaffarpur and other districts of Bihar and adjacent Uttar Pradesh, chances are they’d be lost early on from dire illness, malnutrition and impoverishment; and were they to survive the trauma, they would likely develop into physically stunted and emotionally depraved specimens.

An example of this is the recent hit Netflix series Delhi Crime, a gritty, dramatised reprisal of the brutal gang rape of 2012 that paralysed the nation and stunned the world. In the serial the police — from officer to constable — are valorised as made of sterling stuff, but it’s the rapists and killers in the bus that transfix us: Glassy-eyed, unrepentant, meagre, and morally wasted youth — escapees from the grinding deprivation of the Hindi heartland, adrift in the crevices of the metropolis. Of the six, one killed himself in jail, four are on death row and the sixth, a juvenile, was let off after three years.

As the police track the criminals to their families in villages, it requires no quantum leap of the imagination to link their likes to the distraught, destitute families who dragged their encephalitis-afflicted children to the dysfunctional, desperately understaffed rural clinics and district hospitals in Muzaffarpur this month, and in Gorakhpur last year. 

“Garmi, garibi aur gaon” is how one newspaper summed up the cause of the current outbreak of children’s deaths, a death knell that tolls louder and is a glaring aberration in the prime minister’s ambition of transforming India into a $5-trillion economy by 2024.

“And what do you know about hunger and poverty?” the 19th century novelist and social reformer Charles Dickens was known to rhetorically ask audiences of wealthy Victorian burghers who quizzed him about his cautionary stories of burnt-out childhoods — of starving children put to flight, worked to the bone in toxic factories, and taking to crime in their short, brutish lives. (Dickens’s had first-hand experience when his father ended up in a debtors’ prison.)

The trouble is that there is no dearth of information and research on malnutrition and child mortality in India. Other than the copious district-wise analysis available in the National Family Health Survey 2015-2016, here is what Unicef’s Global Nutrition Report for 2018 states: “More than half of the world’s children impacted by wasting (26.9 million) live in South Asia. Of the three countries that are home to almost half (47.2%) of all stunted children, two are in Asia: India (46.6 million) and Pakistan (10.7 million) … India holds almost a third (31%) of the world’s burden for stunting, so researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) used district-level data to understand spatial differences in the distribution of stunting across India’s districts — with 239 of 604 districts having stunting levels above 40%. This data was then used to inform policies and action.”

The last two words — “policy and action” — that are operative. Given the informed context, and cause and effect of the recurring deaths, scant investment is quoted as the primary reason of a shambolic health care system. This may be the case but it is inefficient use of resources, no clear chain of delivery, and an overriding lack of accountability that are at the root of the persisting evil. 

Legislators zip in and out, mouthing empty words and proffering bereavement cheques; district administrators spring into action only when the crisis explodes in television headlines. No one is sacked. On the contrary struggling medical staff are besieged by intrusive journalists and — as in Gorakhpur in 2017 — even jailed for shortage of emergency oxygen supply. In Muzaffarpur, an uneasy ruling alliance between Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and the BJP shadowed the unfolding disaster in execrable political point-scoring.

Blighted childhoods are an urban reality as much as in the hinterland’s perilous zones. Close by my house in a middle-class south Delhi neighbourhood is a large (usually overflowing) municipal garbage dump; alongside is a makeshift shack where the local “presswallah” and his family irons laundry day in and out. It is a ubiquitous Delhi scene, with one difference: When not delivering crisply ironed clothes to local customers, their children play on, and pay their keep, by picking through plastic bags of garbage. Their main companions are a group of fierce street dogs that howl through the night. 

Dickens would have taken the situation and spun fiction, mapping the children’s future in a twisted tale of prostitution, abuse, theft and jail. If they survived they would be immortalised as Artful Dodgers and if they perished, they would end up in forgotten graves like a thousand others.