Mumbai: In June-July last year, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme of Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry of Maharashtra conducted a survey through Anganwadi workers and supervisors. Shockingly, they discovered there are more than 1.75 lakh children of the age group zero-six years, under the Severe Acute Malnourished (SAM) category. This was in complete contrast to the earlier claims made by the WCD of only 20,000 malnourished children.
Worse still, after the officials stumbled upon this data, the WCD ministry have pulled down the data from the official server, which is used by all district collectors, Chief Executive Officers of Zilla Parishad and other officials through the ICDS line listing portal.
Now, this data is not made available to these officials, the accessibility is exclusively only for the secretary and commissioner of WCD ministry. The Free Press Journal has in possession copies of both the data compiled by line listing and ICDS department.
The discrepancies came to light as the Anganwadi workers collected the data of children, measuring their weight and height. The conventional method is to detect Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) or Moderate Acute Malnutrition (MAM) children.
This was collected on the basis of date of birth, weight, height and Mid-Upper-Arm-Circumference (MUAC). MUAC is used for the assessment of nutritional status. Based on these measurements, Anganwadi workers classify children into SAM/MAM or normal category. Monthly Progress Reports (MPR) are submitted to the WCD.
An official from WCD said the entire scam of ICDS was exposed after the number of malnourished children increased, which was based on government data.“The ICDS officials hid the exact statistics and did not reveal the line listing data because they feared the high number of malnourished children would make the government look in bad light.
There is already a case being in the Bombay High Court and the government has been slammed for the high number of death of children due to malnutrition. However, the lies of ICDS have been exposed,” said an academician working with the government, who did not wish to be named.
WCD and ICDS conducted a survey in June-July 2018 and asked Anganwadi workers and supervisors to collect data omitting the classification of children on a software ‘line listing’, which is developed and provided by KPMG, an official consultancy agency, empanelled on Government of Maharashtra. The supervisors fed all the data provided by the Anganwadi workers.
As the compilation was underway, the officials were taken aback by the compiled results. “The supervisors did not classify the data of SAM or MAM separately in the line listing software. The results were rather shocking, as the total number of malnourished children was way more than the claims,” said the expert.
The Free Press Journal is in possession of the official data of 17 districts calculated through line listing data. The data reveals, Thane-Palghar district has 10,658 SAM children, whereas the National Health Mission (GoM) data shows 8598 children are under severe under weight (SUW) in this district.
“NHM is hiding the data of the number of children under SAM and misleading the government by actually showing the SUW data. SAM is a critical category, which means the health of the child is precarious. They can die,” explained the expert.
According to the expert, the figures are not exaggerated, since the government hides it to shield itself from criticism. Interestingly, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) led by the union government has declared that the number of SAM children is about 7 to 8 per cent. This varies from district to district and ICDS of state claiming it as just 0.1 per cent of the total population of children under age six years.
Eknath Shinde, minister for public health admitted there is an increase in the total number of children who are malnourished. “The number of malnourished children has increased in Maharashtra and it is time officials of all the concerned departments work together to eradicate malnutrition.”
