Young MPs show they care

Nitin Sethi, Times of India

GWALIOR: Not that one needs to travel deep into India to find it, but a few young MPs, cutting across party lines, decide to, nevertheless, trace the contours of malnourishment in the rural areas of Gwalior. Lack of nutrition makes 46% of children under the age of three underweight, says the third National Family Health Survey. Madhya Pradesh has the highest levels of malnourishment among children, and substantially worse than Gujarat and Meghalaya, the two other states with high levels of malnourishment. But the MPs are not tossing up the stats in a political cauldron. One just can't. It's a phenomenon entrenched long — and wide — enough in the hinterland to make all parties equally culpable. Sachin Pilot (Congress), Supriya Sule (NCP), Shahnawaz Hussain (BJP), Jay Panda (BJD) and Prema Cariappa (Congress) comprise the team. First official stop on the day-long tour and they learn visual evidence can hide or tell as much as statistics do. UNICEF is backing up the tour, with logistics and information. The district administration, aware of the visit, has tried to 'sanitise' the villages on the schedule. The Anganwadi centre, run under the government's Integrated Child Development Scheme, at the two villages that the MPs visit are working on the day. Villagers voice their issues well when they confront the MPs. The primary health centre at one village is freshly painted, the mattresses have just been brought in from the town and the ice and water too have been arranged for the visiting dignitaries. But the Anganwadi at Rampura village, the first official pit stop, is just like one of the 7.44 lakh Anganwadis under ICDS. It's got its attendant problems, but the village is right now too bothered about the lack of water for agriculture. "Get us water and we will sort out the rest,"says one villager to the team, which also has Peenaz Masani, the veteran singer, and Gauri Karnik, a budding actor. It's an expected statement but it underpins the fact about doles. No Anganwadi project can perpetually provide nutritional security to rural India. Nutritional and food security is a far larger political question of second-generation agrarian reforms. Till politics finds an answer to that question, Anganwadis and other programmes under ICDS remain key operational tactic to reduce malnutrition, albeit, an expensive tactic. The government's expenditure on ICDS has risen from Rs 1,444 crore in 2003-04 to Rs 4,087 crore in 2006-07, an annual growth of 41%. "We are not here to point out problems or mistakes; we are here to understand what causes such chronic malnourishment in India. This is just the first place we are visiting and it's not as if we have not seen the situation in our own regions but it's a collective effort by us to see if we can voice these concerns louder, at a greater level,"says Sachin Pilot. The journalists travelling with them are enthusiastic-sceptics: "So what will this lead to? What does this venture by the young MPs really mean for the people?"— they fire out the questions at the first given opportunity. "The problem is acute and it needs to be addressed in Parliament just as much as the media needs to put it out prominently in the public domain,"replies Sule. "If we can get it higher on national priority, a tad bit higher, we will achieve our bit,"she adds.