| Congress heir apparent Rahul Gandhi has set off on a 'Discover India' tour. But one person who needs to make such a tour is Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chaudhury. She seems to know everything about women and children but is yet to change something big in their lives. For example, their hunger. She can make a start with Bom village in Uttar Pradesh's Sonbhadra district which will find a prominent place in any map for underweight children and their mothers, if ever Chaudhury's ministry were to make one. |
| Take a village resident Dewanti from the Bhuiya tribe. She is seven months pregnant with her fourth child. She, as well as her youngest son Om Prakash, were desperately in need of help as they were severely undernourished, not to mention underclothed, in a cold morning of January this year. But she didn't go to an anganwadi provided by Renuka Chaudhury's ministry for every child under the age of three and for pregnant and lactating mothers. |
| The area's anganwadi worker, Pari Gupta, does not know of her existence. She is supposed to provide her with take-home food packets that will last her and her child for a week. |
| Dewanti's husband Dwarika, who breaks stones in the hills nearby for Rs 60 a day and also does some share-cropping, does not have a BPL card. They have an APL card which gives them three litres of kerosene and some sugar. They buy rice from outside for Rs 12 a kg and make do with whatever they get from the work on the farm. |
| The rice they buy is 'khanda', the local term for poultry feed. It is broken and is meant for poultry. Says Dewanti: "The anganwadi worker will drive me away if I go. She says you can't just come unless you are registered here. Only 15 people can be registered here at a time." |
| On being goaded to go to the anganwadi to demand her rights, she gets up. She goes there only to find no one at the centre, which is a kilometre away. |
| The programme of anganwadis, called the Integrated Child Development Services, is meant to address the nutrition needs of all the children under the age of three and also of mothers who are pregnant or lactating in a given area. |
| In the neighbouring Dhorpa village, the primary school has one room converted into an anganwadi and the anganwadi worker shows a half empty bag of 'panjiri' or processed wheat and sugar mixture, which children are given at noon. She gets three such bags of about 10 kg each. |
| The teacher has barely four students and they sit along with the other schoolchildren waiting for lunch-time, when the others get their mid-day meals. The anganwadi worker says that if she were to distribute the food mixture in the morning, the children would all want to leave. So the food is given late and the hungry children are forced to wait. There are of course no nursery rhymes or activities for the children in this anganwadi. |
| Social workers in Duddhi say there is no food either. The food bags are sold to villagers at Rs 150 a kg to feed their cattle. The yield improves with such nutrition, says Abhay Kumar whose Duddhi Gram Vikas Samiti works to mobilise people to seek jobs under the NREGP. |
| The other day, Renuka Chaudhury was exhorting the world to be proactive to stop female foeticide. Would she prefer that the children are then starved to death? |
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