Sunil Sethi: Why India's children go missing

AL FRESCO

The hunt has been on ever since the grisly killings of children of Nithari in Noida were uncovered. Where do India's missing children go? If they don't end up as victims of psychopathic killers, are they forced into slave labour, trafficked in red light districts or left destitute to beg on the streets? Recent media campaigns to track down missing children have erupted in a rush of stories from the slums and brothels of Agra and Mumbai to villages in Bihar and Jharkhand.

There is even an NGO called the National Centre for Missing Children, which gives some grim estimates (accompanied by pathetic snapshots) on its website: the number of runaway children may be in the region of 1 million a year, that is, an Indian child goes missing every 30 seconds if you add on the number of abandoned or abducted kids.

No real figures are available, compared to detailed statistics supplied by, say, the US department of Justice on numbers of runaway, lost or abducted under-18s in America in the last year.

But this is only one side of the picture of lost Indian childhoods. Much darker are the numbers of children dying a slow death due to chronic malnutrition within the family-fold. The recently released third National Family Health Survey casts a shadow on the India Shining story, with economic growth rates touching 9 per cent. According to the survey, nearly 46 per cent of Indian children under the age of three are underweight, 38.4 per cent are stunted and over 19 per cent wasted. China, by comparison, has less than 10 per cent of its child population underweight and sub-Saharan Africa, with its images of famine, civil wars, refugee camps and emaciated babies, has 29 per cent. All developing countries average 27 per cent.

Those who have spent years scrutinising and analysing such data, such as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen or the Supreme Court, continue to be flabbergasted why a host of government programmes seem to have no appreciable effect in fighting the hidden hunger of India's children due to serious nutrient deficiency. They have repeatedly questioned the government's failure to ensure specific calorie intake""iron, iodine and Vitamin A in particular""to each child and multiply the area of coverage. Why do programmes such as the 30-year-old ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) or the mid-day meal services work so imperfectly? Why have arguments by social scientists and the Supreme Court's series of orders gone unheeded?

The simple answer is inefficiency and incompetence. Like the PDS, the ICDS and mid-day meal schemes are run in a wayward, ramshackle way with no basic standard and little accountability. Eighty per cent of the ICDS's budget of Rs 4,543 crore is spent on salaries. Supplementary food schemes are in any case directed at school-goers; so children in the 0-3 age group, the greatest at risk, are left to languish. But overall, are the numbers of Indian children""the chronically hungry who go missing every day""coming down?

Not appreciably. In the last 10 years malnutrition rates among India's children are declining at a rate of about 2 per cent a year, which is dangerously low. Bangladesh, despite political instability and slower economic growth, has brought down malnutrition rates by about 6 per cent.

What is more surprising is that policy planners and international agencies more or less know where exactly India's children are going missing. Geographically, about 10 per cent of Indian villages account for 28 per cent of child malnutrition""and they are in certain districts of the BIMARU states""Bihar, UP, Orissa, MP and Rajasthan. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Many of these issues will come up for discussion at the Geneva-based organisation Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), funded and partnered by UN agencies, the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which is holding a conference in Delhi later this month. Those who worry about India's missing children should keep tabs.