Thanks to Stephanie Nolen for tweeting the link to a long Bloomberg report by Andrew MacAskill and Mehul Srivastava: India Sees Children Dying as $2 Billion Program Proves Defective. This is the background of the "free lunch" program that killed 25 children in Bihar. It is the single most horrifying report I have read in a long time. Excerpt:
India’s only government program to nourish as many as 160 million children under six has failed those from Kaushambhi district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and tens of millions of others around the country. The billions India budgets for feeding children -- 4.4 cents for each per day -- have barely dented one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition.
Instead, the program has allowed a web of private firms to take over distribution, in defiance of orders from the Supreme Court of India. For almost a decade the firms have delivered -- or not delivered -- a supply of unpalatable powdered rations of dubious nutritional value, according to interviews, court documents and a confidential report showing one state government has known about the theft and corruption for more than a year.
Waving Shotgun
In Uttar Pradesh, those rations are produced in an old flour mill about 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the border with Nepal. There, paint peels off the walls, sacks of food are stored in the open and a mustachioed security guard waves a loaded shotgun at a reporter to deny him entry. More than 1,000 kilometers to the west in Bhilkera, in Maharashtra state, villager Ganesh Bilikamkale feeds powder meant for the children to his cows because it is so bad humans won’t eat it.
“It is an appalling situation that says so much about the problems in our country,” said Gurcharan Das, the former chief executive of the Indian unit of Procter & Gamble Co. (PG) and the author of “India Grows at Night” (2012), a book about government shortcomings.
“There is a moral failure here, but the failure of governance has allowed it to happen.”
Looting Food
The dysfunction in India’s child food program, called Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), is just one example of how malnutrition ravages the country. More than three-quarters of the 1.2 billion population eats less than the minimum targets set by the government. The ratio has risen from about two-thirds in 1983.
Corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates have looted as much as $14.5 billion in food intended for public distribution to families in Uttar Pradesh alone. Food Minister K.V. Thomas cut short an interview and asked a Bloomberg reporter to leave when asked about corruption in the nutrition- distribution system.
When it comes to the children’s program, the national government and six state governments have failed to act even after repeated warnings that the relief food was failing to arrive or was substandard. A government-commissioned study said in 2011 that about 60 percent of the food meant for children was being siphoned off along the supply chain.And this is a country with which the rest of the world has cordial economic and diplomatic relations.
