on the spot
Tavleen Singh
Independence Day in Mumbai always makes me sad rather than happy. No uplifting images from the freedom movement fill my head, they are blotted out by the sight of malnourished, barefoot street children selling flags and tricolor brooches at traffic lights. Some of these children I know well because I feed them breakfast every day through a small programme I started long ago called ‘Nashta’. When I see them on the eve of Independence Day standing in rain wet streets, trying late into the night, to sell those drooping flags and metal brooches I am reminded of what I believe to be independent India’s greatest betrayal: the criminal neglect of her children.
Surely in 65 years of freedom we should have succeeded at the very least in giving every Indian child half a chance at leading a relatively healthy life. It would not have been too much to ask if we had not always followed the wrong policies. We have come up with such schemes as the ‘world’s largest children’s welfare programme’, the ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) that has been mostly useless but instead of coming up with new ways of dealing with the problem political leaders in Delhi have simply gone on to give us more of the same.
This year I found the sight of these children particularly poignant because unbeknownst to them their leaders are planning to spend hundreds of thousands of crore rupees in their name on a food security bill that will make no difference to their lives. Even if their homeless, and wretchedly poor families manage to find a way of getting the grain they are entitled to they will continue to be malnourished because the problem is more complicated than our policy makers appear to realize. How do I know this? Because of ‘Nashta’ and because some of the children I fed ten years ago, when the programme began, now have children of their own and their problems are to do with not getting the right kind food rather than not getting enough food.
Some months ago Surekha, whom I have known since she was ten, rang me in a panic to tell me that her two year old son needed hospitalization because of what appeared to be an attack of whooping cough. When I spoke to the doctors who were treating him they said that the reason why he had the persistent cough was because he was severely malnourished. ‘All he gets to eat in the day is ‘pao’ (bread) and tea and what he needs is upma, vegetables and milk.’ It made me restart ‘Nashta’ which had lapsed temporarily in between. So Surekha’s son now gets one meal of upma, vegetables and milk every morning as do a group of about twenty children who live with him on a pavement off Mumbai’s glittering Marine Drive.
If Sonia Gandhi were really interested in the health of Indian children, half of whom are officially malnourished, what she would be spending money on would be the sort of soup kitchens that churches run in European and American cities. But, she wants a big, dramatic gesture that she hopes will help her son become prime minister after the 2014 general election so we are landed with an expensive food bill that is almost certainly going to be as much of a dud as the anti-poverty programmes successive Congress prime ministers have invested in since 1947.
It is India’s bad luck that no State Governments or opposition leaders have challenged the new food bill on grounds of efficacy until last week when Narendra Modi took up the cause. From excerpts of a letter he has written to the Prime Minister that the Indian Express carried on the eve of Independence Day, I learned that he has warned the prime minister that the new law will not be able to provide food security to the poor. He said, “A meeting of the chief ministers of states needs to be called before the matter is finalized by Parliament, a step which should have been taken on such an important Centre-state issue, and which has not been taken so far.”
Hopefully if this meeting does happen chief ministers will point out that instead of vast, centralized, unwieldy schemes what India’s hungry children need are smaller programmes run by NGOs like Akshaypatra which has shown in Karnataka how much difference one square meal can make in a child’s life. After Akshaypatra started their programme of supplying midday meals in Bangalore’s schools statistics showed a dramatic improvement in school attendance and a simultaneous improvements in results. All that Akshaypatra does is provide one nutritious meal a day in which children can eat as much as they want. Often these are children whose parents can afford to give them no more than a cup of tea in the morning before they come to school.
There are other NGO’s who run similar programmes that are funded by big private corporations, religious trusts and charitable organizations. It is something that every Indian who has enough to eat could do in a small way in their own neighbourhood and if they do not it is mostly because the leitmotif of the kind of India we have built since 1947 is that of a paternalistic, omnipotent, all-embracing state. The dynasty that has ruled India for nearly all of the past 65 years has taken full advantage of this and taxpayers money has been used for welfare programmes that bear the names of one or other member of this dynasty.
Sonia Gandhi now hopes that the food security bill, when passed, will make voters believe that it is her generosity and her personal intervention that has gone towards providing cheap food grain to seventy percent of the population of India. It is our misfortune that she has been backed publicly by an eminent economist like Amartya Sen who seems unable to see that the new law cannot work.
So we are likely to see many more Independence Days when in the mean streets of our cities small children will stand around selling cheap versions of the national flag and cheap tricolor brooches in the hope that they will make enough to buy some food that day. Forgive me for not having thoughts of honour, glory and national pride on this August 15 but I can think of almost nothing to celebrate.
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