Jan 07, 2007: Business Standard

Sreelatha Menon: Fighting hunger
EAR TO THE GROUND
Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi January 07, 2007
Has Kalahandi finally cracked the code for combating undernourishment among its children below the age of three?

If so, then it is a miracle that is happening despite the special funds meant for KBK districts, which are making little difference to the levels of poverty in the district, and a comatose National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme. This miracle strategy, called positive deviance (PD), introduced two years ago is the opposite of most ad hoc arrangements adopted by the governments in the name of health and education. Unlike poorly paid ad hoc teachers running schools in most low literacy states and the low paid anganwadi workers (Rs 1,000 a month) in the feeding centres run under Integrated Child Development Services, the cooking and feeding in PD is carried out by mothers themselves. Of course, the feeding happens in anganwadi centres and continues for a year for each targeted child.

In Vietnam, the method evolved by funders CARE, was to get mothers of healthy babies (positive deviants) to share their menus and feeding practices with mothers of feeble kids. It turned out that the PD mothers had been mixing easily available sea food with the rice they served. However, in Kalahandi no such sharing is on. The mothers merely came with vegetables and cooked together in the anganwadis and fed their chidren for two weeks every month.

They even contributed an egg every alternate week and shared it with another mother. Malnutrition rates for 2006 were 24 per cent, down from 31 per cent in 2004 and district authorities say the worst is over. In Utkela centre in Kesinga block, one-year-old Ritu Majhi was severely underweight six months ago. Today he is normal, even chubby.

But even in the midst of these interventions, there are signs of the future of these mostly Dalit and tribal children remaining unchanged. In tribal Pratappur village in Lanjigarh block of the district, there are barely 20 houses and almost all of them have ST families.

But the anganwadi worker is a Brahmin, Mamata Misra. In Udaipur anganwadi it is Urmila Sahu a non SC/ST. In fact in village after village, the only visible position of power, that of the anganwadi worker, is with the general category.

Sanghamitra Kanungo, who heads ICDS operations in Kalahandi, has been working in the district and neighbouring Koraput for the last two decades. She admits that only 20 per cent of posts are with ST and none with SC. Or no one will eat at the anganwadis, she says.

While discrimination keeps out SC, the qualification of eighth grade keeps out ST candidates. Tribal villages are mostly the tiny hamlets which have only a primary school and are cut off from most government facilities including roads and post offices reserved for dense villages. And unlike what the Planning Commission imagines, when it floats residential schools from class I, parents, even tribal ones, loathe to send children off to hostels from day one.

So these are the realities the tiny SC/ST villagers in Kalahandi will have to lump with the PD daliya.