Date March 17, 2012
Ben Doherty
The hard plains of central India yield little.
The crops failed the year Ujala was born. Her mother was ill and there was nothing for anyone in her family to eat.
India remains one of the fastest growing economies of the world.
When the Herald first visited Ujala in 2009, she was four months old and weighed just 1.5 kilograms.
Malnutrition in Indian children
A little girl named Ujala, 4 months old from the village of Paretha in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, weighs 1.5 kg and is one example of malnutrition in this particular area. Photo: Brendan Esposito
The family have not weighed her since. They don't have the money for a doctor, nor can they see the point after their daughter was abandoned by the hospital last time, told she was too ill to treat, that she wouldn't survive.
But she did survive. Ujala is 3½ now, but it's doubtful she has put on much more weight since.
She cannot walk, speak or even sit properly unaided. All she can do is cry, piteously, a thin whine she makes when she is hungry.
The other face of India … Ujala, 3½ , sits in the arms of her mother, Geeta. The lack of food for her and her mother in those first critical months have crippled her body and cruelled her brain development. She will never go to school, or work, or marry.
"She is not going to improve," her father, Raju, says, holding his slack-limbed daughter in his arms. "And I worry. How can I not worry for her? She is my child."
Ujala has a younger brother, born in a year the rains fell.
The other face of India … Ujala, 3½ , sits in the arms of her mother, Geeta.
At 11 months old, Roshan is runny-nosed and restless, a chubby, stumbling toddler who towers over his elder sister, at least twice her size.
But this is not just the story of Ujala, this is the story of the country in which she lives.
This is the tale of two Indias.
The train line near Ujala's dusty village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh runs to Mumbai, India's glitzy financial capital and a symbol of the country's burgeoning wealth.
In the same week the Herald revisited Ujala, India brought down its budget, promising gross domestic product growth of 7.6 per cent and 8.6 per cent over the next two years.
"India remains one of the fastest growing economies of the world," the Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, boasted.
But for all of its economic growth, its ceaseless development and its nascent emergence as a global economic superpower, India remains home to half the world's poor and hungry. More than 400 million exist here on less than a dollar a day.
In this dichotomous place, more than half of all Indians own a mobile phone. Fewer than that have access to a toilet.
In parts of India - such as Ujala's village of Paretha - child malnutrition rates are worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Hunger and Malnutrition survey released by the government found 42 per cent of Indian children were underweight, 59 per cent stunted by lack of food.
India has long been earmarked for greatness on the promise of its ''youth dividend'': its huge young population that will see it surpass an ageing China as the most populous country on earth, with the largest workforce.
This young generation - 40 per cent of Indians are under 18 - educated and aspiring, are to drive India to global eminence.
But ill-fed and uneducated, that youth dividend would become India's burden, a massive generation of unproductive, uneconomic adults.
As simple as it is, food matters. A Lancet survey found those who were malnourished as children earn 20 per cent less than those who had enough to eat.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has urged India to abandon its obsession with gross domestic product figures.
"You have to see how our lives are improving, '' Sen said in The Economic Times. ''India may have the second-fastest growth rate but we have the largest number of undernourished children in the world. We have lower literacy. In all the human development categories, girls' education, basic medical care … we are the worst performer among South Asian countries,"
"My worry is the sentiment of the country gets upset when it [GDP growth rate] goes from 8 per cent to 7 per cent. The sentiment of India doesn't get affected by the higher number of undernourished children than anywhere else."
The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, called India's childhood malnutrition figures "a national shame".
"Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under nutrition in the country is unacceptably high,'' Singh said. ''We have also not succeeded in reducing this rate fast enough."
In the three years that Ujala has grown just a few centimetres, her country's wealth has increased by half a trillion dollars. Her family's has barely moved.
Her father is the youngest of five brothers.
There are 15 in the extended family that live in the two-room mudbrick house in Paretha, a dun-coloured collection of low-slung homes and dusty fields, huddled around a thin ribbon of black tar connecting it to the outside world.
Raju and his brothers leave home for three or four months at a time, seeking work at nearby farms or brick kilns. They send almost all their money home, but it's never enough.
The family, too, farms the land it owns, barely more than half a hectare of stony, unirrigated ground a few kilometres from the village.
They grow soya beans as a cash crop now, instead of wheat for their own tables, but they can only plant for the monsoon rains, which grow steadily less reliable.
Entering an economy in which they sit at the very bottom, has left families like Ujala's vulnerable - to bad crop years, to rising prices, to unscrupulous traders.
"Malnutrition is not today's problem, it is a whole process that has been going in India," Seema Prakash, from Sandap, a social services organisation says.
"It's only because the distance between people and their food keeps on increasing … that malnutrition gets worse. This problem is much worse with those people like tribals, dalits, who have very little earning capacity for nurturing their children."
Reetika Khera from the Delhi School of Economics says while economic growth will eventually raise standards of living across this diverse country, the benefits of India's last decade of growth have been wildly disproportionate.
"There has been an increase in income inequality in the past 10 to 20 years and the people who are poor, who are the at the very bottom end of the distribution network, are desperately poor in India, and they cannot wait for 10 years for their boat to be lifted by this rising tide," Dr Khera tells the Herald.
And the most fundamental measure of development, that people have enough to eat, has barely moved.
"In spite of this amazing growth in the past decade or so, there has hardly been any improvement in nutrition indicators, especially childhood nutrition indicators … GDP growth itself is not going to do very much about the nutrition indicators unless the government really takes this problem head on."
Government programs to feed India's poor have been stymied by bureaucracy and scandalised by rampant corruption. Huge amounts of grain - running into thousands of tonnes - are illegally siphoned off by crooked operators within the system.
At one time, in the state of Jharkhand, up to 90 per cent of the grain allocated by government to feed the poorest, never reached its destination. The situation is improving, but still half of the grain ''disappears'' before it reaches those without the means to get it anywhere else.
Ujala's entire extended family is entitled to one ration card, which entitles them to 35 kilograms of wheat grain a month. It's a little more than two kilograms each, the months when it does arrive.
"We can't rely on it," Ujala's mother Geeta tells the Herald, speaking in Korku, her tribe's language.
"We don't know what they will give us, one month or the next. The government does not help us. The government does not care.
"For now," she says, gently cradling Ujala, "the situation is better, but the future is uncertain."
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/india-hungers-for-rupees-while-its-children-go-without-food-20120316-1vamm.html#ixzz2GZUniGr0
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