Food-shortage forcing children to eat mud
Children in the hinterlands of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh have resorted to eating silica laced mud due to the non availability of food which has worsened malnourishment and diseases. Officials from various ministries are therefore working on recrafting the Food Security Bill to include such families.
Allahabad/New Delhi: As top officials from multiple ministries worked over the weekend recrafting a draft legislation deemed inadequate to deliver food to the poorest, a grim reminder of the depth of deprivation in India emerged from its most populous state.
- Soni, 5, holding a lump of mud. Older children wait for the excavated moist mud to eat and the younger ones imitate them/ Photo credit: Kamal Kishor/ HT
Frail, malnourished children eating moist lumps of mud laced with silica—a raw material for glass sheets and soap—because they are not officially classified as poor and so ineligible for official help: This is what a Hindustan Times (HT) reporter saw in a village of eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP).
Under an unusually hot April sun, skinny, hungry children silently poked around on the dusty edges of a stone quarry in Ganne village, 45km east of Allahabad and a 12km walk from the nearest road.
“It tastes like powdered gram, so we eat it,” said Soni, 5, a listless girl with a protruding belly. It’s a learnt experience. Older children such as Soni wait for the excavated moist mud. The younger ones imitate them.
With most families reduced to one or two daily meals of boiled rice and salt—with a watery vegetable on a lucky day—the mud is a free but deadly option at the 20 stone quarries sustaining the poorest villagers.
Eating the mud worsens malnutrition and disease, but these families are not eligible for subsidized food and other state programmes, though each of a family of five earns about Rs400 a month; UP’s official poverty line is Rs435 per person per month.
It is people like these that Congress president and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi wants covered by a national Food Security Bill.
That is why she pushed the UPA’s top ministers back to the drawing board after rejecting last week a draft that was about to be presented to the cabinet.
Headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, the empowered group of ministers (eGoM) will meet on Monday to consider upping the official family entitlement to subsidized food from 25kg to 35kg, bringing the homeless into official safety nets, and perhaps redrawing the poverty line; less than 300 million are officially poor today.
The eight ministers include agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, home minister P. Chidambaram, railway minister Mamata Banerji and rural development minister C.P. Joshi.
“There has been a lot of pressure from Sonia Gandhi to expand this legislation and make it truly inclusive,” said a food ministry official, requesting anonymity. “She has spoken to the finance minister about this.”
