Bloomberg news
written by Andrew MacAskill & Mehul Srivastava
Tuesday December 18, 2012
The three untended child-sized graves, a few minutes’ walk from the village of Paltupur, bear witness to what happened when the trucks loaded with nutritional powder stopped coming to this desolate corner of eastern India.
Great Value Foods Ltd.’s deliveries of the tasteless yellow substance, funded by a $2 billion program
NO CHILD SHOULD BE STARVED TO DEATH WITH GOVERNMENT SPENDING $2 BILLION!!! THIEVES!!! SHAME ON YOU! EVERY GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE CONNECTED TO THIS PROGRAM SHOULD BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY AND CHARGED WITH THEFT AND MURDER. (emphasis mine)for India’s youngest and poorest, were cut off in August. All 2-year-old Jialal’s mother had left to give her son was boiled rice, the only food she could afford on a yearly income of about $75.
As the days stretched into weeks, the boy kept losing weight. His crying grew feeble. He ran fevers. He’d fall as soon as his mother, Kalavati, let go of his hand.
On Sept. 23, Jialal died, strapped to his mother’s chest as she searched the countryside for help. He wasn’t the first victim in the village, nor the last. On Aug. 20, Archna died. She was two. On Oct. 2, Anjali died. She was two.
In a neighboring village, graves also were dug for Karishma, who died on Sept. 10 at the age of one. And for Raj Kamal, who was two when he died on Oct. 4.
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.
Daily Deaths
The poor northern states, including Uttar Pradesh, that account for nearly half of India’s population and suffer from the highest rates of child malnutrition have the lowest levels of funding, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from government reports.
One in every three malnourished children lives in India and about 50 percent of all childhood deaths are attributed to malnutrition, according to Unicef. In 2011, 1.7 million children under the age of five died in India, about 5,000 a day.
Of those 5,000, at least half die of malnutrition-related causes often associated with infectious diseases, according to Child in Need India, a London-based charity. Another 11 percent die from diarrhea, which further weakens children as their body is unable to absorb nutrition.
In only a few places in India does the feeding program provide hot meals. In the Maharashtra district of Melghat, children eat steaming rice and dal in a feeding center in the village of Semahado. Before a 2011 state court order, they were fed daily fistfuls of nutritional powder.
For many of the 40 children, this is the only time they will get any vegetables. It’s one of their two meals a day.
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.
Three Orders
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was told of defects in the program in a 2007 letter from a Supreme Court investigator and in a 2009 meeting with commissioners to the court, according to two people present who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Supreme Court has ordered the government of India to fix issues with the food program three times since 2004.
In response to questions, the prime minister’s office provided details on how the government is working to improve the program. An October 2012 plan calls for restructuring the ICDS over three years, increasing focus on children under three. Higher daily allowances for each child will boost expenditures for the nutrition part of the program to $7.8 billion from the central government over the next five years. State governments usually match that.
The restructuring document didn’t clarify whether private firms should be banned from the process, suggesting that various models, including self-help groups or centralized kitchens, be considered, in addition to “bona fide manufacturers.”
Implementation Issues
The program has been “well-conceived,” the plan said. “The real problem lies in its implementation, which arises out of inadequate funding, lack of convergence, accountability of those managing and implementing the programme.”
“If these inadequacies are addressed appropriately, the scheme has the potential to give satisfactory nutritional and child-development outcomes.”
One of the few government bodies to have had any success improving the system is a special agency created by the Supreme Court. For 10 years it has struggled to ban private firms from the feeding program.
The court push is part of a tradition of activism at India’s highest judicial body. Last year it ordered companies to stop mining in areas of mineral-rich Karnataka state to protect the environment, and earlier this year it scrapped phone licenses that were allegedly rigged to favor certain companies. By encouraging public-interest litigation, similar to class- action lawsuits in the U.S., the court has helped empower marginalized Indians to claim their rights, including to government information.
Orders Ignored
While the court’s commissioners on the Right to Food Campaign helped provide evidence that led to the bust of criminal syndicates in the state of Karnataka, the three orders from the court over five years against hiring private contractors have been ignored in Indian states including Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan and Meghalaya.
“It speaks volumes about the nature of administration in India that court orders are blatantly violated,” said Raj Kumar, a law professor and vice chancellor of O.P. Jindal Global University in Haryana. Until India delivers on the promise of economic justice made in the constitution, “our democracy will have little meaning for the vast number of people who are living on the margins.”
India has the highest percentage of malnourished children in the world except for East Timor, according to the 2012 annual Global Hunger Index. The report said 43.5 percent of Indian children are underweight. It is compiled by a group of non- governmental organizations including the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
Faked Paperwork
About $540 million of food meant for children was stolen or registered as delivered via faked paperwork in 2009, according to a 2011 internal review of the program by the New Delhi-based National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). In Uttar Pradesh state, so much was siphoned off that each severely malnourished child received food worth less than a penny a day.
In both Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, India’s most populous states, most of the money has gone to private firms.
Great Value Foods has held the largest ICDS contract in Uttar Pradesh for the past seven years, according to a program document obtained under India’s Right to Information Act. The biggest stake in Great Value Foods was owned by a company belonging to a liquor baron named Gurdeep Singh Chadha -- until he was shot and killed by his brother last month.
In Maharashtra, private companies have exploited a loophole, intended to increase the participation of women’s groups, to take over feeding contracts for the entire state.
Apartment Building
While Great Value Foods doesn’t have a listed phone number or website, a freedom of information act request showed it is headquartered in an upscale residential area of south Delhi. The building is a four-story apartment building with balconies on each level at the front and back. In the basement, filing cabinets sat behind a meshed fence as 10 to 15 people worked.
A man who said his name was Bidesh Gupta confirmed the building was an office of Great Value Foods and asked a Bloomberg News reporter who visited his office on Dec. 17 to return the next day. When two reporters did so he wasn’t there.
Shree Sadakanth, the director of the Uttar Pradesh Women and Child Development Ministry, which runs the program at the state level, declined a request for an interview. His deputy, Brij Mohan, initially agreed to an interview with Bloomberg News, but didn’t allow reporters into his office after they had provided a list of questions at his request.
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