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Fifty Fifty
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GROUND ZERO
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Fifty Fifty I am shocked and surprised at the response from many politicians over the death of 23 children in Bihar. It was a tragedy waiting to happen. How very convenient it is now for them to make it into a political conspiracy and an anti-government move. I wonder how these men and women sleep at night, and whether those lifeless bodies of our children, who were supposed to be our so called ‘demographic dividend’, do not haunt them? Have we become so callous? Year on year, stories flood the media that the food provided to the children in state-supported schools, all over the country, is often substandard and sometimes not even fit for human consumption.
Lizards, snakes and worms have been reported in the meals, and surveys have shown that other kinds of adulteration take place as well. Barely were the children in Chapra rushed to hospital (where many of them are still ill) when news came from another part of the state that 15 children had been reported ill as a lizard was suspected to have fallen into their midday meal. Meanwhile, in Maharashtra another 31 children developed gastroenteritis after consuming their school meals. And so it goes on and on…. The real worry now should be not how many children will die immediately, but about the slow damage being done to their bodies and brains by feeding them rubbish. While we all welcome a policy that ensures that these children, who often come from the most vulnerable sections of society, might attend school because of the midday meal scheme, and also receive some much-needed nutrition, the fact that an estimated 100 million schoolchildren are fed through it is often used as an excuse for its failures. How can a programme this large be monitored? The fact that it is targeted — and there must be a well established chain through which the money reaches the school and the food reaches the children — is something that should be a cause of extreme concern. When such a careful feeding programme with known beneficiaries can go awry so badly, what will happen with the food which will be thrown at an unsuspecting population through the Food Security Ordinance? Right now all kinds of red lights should be flashing and panic should be setting in among those who are promoting it. If a simple scheme like this is forcing children to become malnourished (through poor quality grains mixed with worms, and now pesticide), shouldn’t we be thinking about it once again? Surveys in selected districts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have shown that only up to 75 per cent of the requisitioned food is usually doled out to the children in any case. There are also issues of cleanliness and often the cook-cum-helper hired for the task (at a salary of around just Rs 1,000 per month) is not paid for months altogether. Even in areas like Mumbai schoolteachers have found that children resist eating the food, which is often of poor quality. The easy answer would be to replace the hot food with prepackaged meals for the children. But, alas, there have been instances when even biscuits given to children have made them sick. Despite all this, for some peculiar reason, the government has not taken the views of the stakeholders, i.e., the children who are recipients of this deadly state run charity, into account. No regular checks are done on the state of children’s health who consume this food, and no attempts made to ask them what they would like to eat either. Why? Just because they are too young to vote? Even in Chapra, when the children started complaining of stomachache while eating, the principal forced them to finish the meal. She, after all, was only doing what the government is doing to the children — insisting they eat horrible food. The problem, as we know, is that both in the acquisition as well as the delivery mechanism corruption is rampant. While the Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, has just announced the princely sum of Rs 2 lakh for every child that has died, the fact remains these underprivileged children have become victims of these free school meals, rather than its beneficiaries. The only way we will be able to resolve the problem now is to ensure that parliamentarians are forced to eat the same food that the children eat, every day. A midday meal should be introduced in every state Assembly as well as Parliament, where each MLA and MP is treated to this delicious concoction of lizards, rat droppings and a few handfuls of rotting grain. They must eat it every day, for at least 11 years. And so must their families. The divide and distance between the representatives of the people and the people has become far too great. Let this midday meal provide the missing link.
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good news
SOME
good comes of everything. When the Block Development Officer (BDO) of Fatehpur Chaurasi in Unnao, UP, ignored the demands of wage labourers for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA), little did he know that this would only help them. Nowhere to go, the desperate labourers learnt about the Janta Suchna Kendra (JSK) and demanded work after getting online print of their application number as proof. Within 15 days, they became eligible for compensation for not getting work. When the higher-ups pulled up the BDO, he discovered the role of the JSK in helping the marginalised claim what was their due. More than 200 job card holders have since registered themselves online. Five of them have got work while the others are awaiting compensation. A major step in making governance transparent was the implementation of the Right to Information Act (RTI) in 2005. Power tool Theoretically it appears that the “aam aadmi” now need not move from pillar to post to access information and public services that have, in recent times, gone online. Accessing justice through the RTI is, however, a distant dream as most citizens find writing an application and sending it to the appropriate officer an insurmountable hurdle, especially in rural India. With a population of 20 crores, Uttar Pradesh has officially barely 2.30 lakh Internet connections, which serve only a fraction of its population. It is in such a dismal scenario that the eight JSKs set up by the Asha Foundation in collaboration with Leeds University, UK, Hindustan Petroleum and others are a pioneering step to democratise the RTI. The first such JSK was established with the help of Hindustan Petroleum under its corporate social responsibility programme and will complete a year on June 5. At first sight, the modest kendra appears to be a photocopying-cum-typing kiosk, the kind that dot commercial complexes in the country. Located in the industrial town of Kanpur, the JSK is run by 51-year-old school dropout Shankar, who left the lucrative work of facilitating people acquire driver’s licences to train as an RTI activist. Hindustan Petroleum gave Rs 2 lakh for two centres at Kanpur and Sandilla (Hardoi), which was used to buy computers, printers, fax machines, scanners and heavy-duty inverters. With the paraphernalia in place, the Kanpur kendra has been running successfully for the last one year. So far, about 260 RTI applications have been filed here. “Most complaints pertain to everyday problems — inflated electricity bill, failure to get a ration card, not getting house despite depositing money with the housing board, widow and old-age pension, or even failure to get scholarships,” says Shankar. He assists people in drafting and typing applications, attaching the mandatory postal order of Rs 10, keeping a photocopy for further reference and sending it to the information officer of the department concerned by registered post. All these services come for barely Rs 150, which is within the reach of people, even labourers. Mudit Shukla, Asha Foundation project coordinator of the JSK initiative, says during the last one year, eight such JSKs have come up at Sandilla, Amethi, Barabanki, Unnao, rural Varanasi, Patna, and the newest one in Lucknow. The initiative Explaining the concept behind the JSKs, he says they were developed as a tool to democratise the RTI and work as a sustainable model to empower village-based social activists who are “whole-timers” with no independent income to support them. With the seed money of barely Rs 1.50 lakh to Rs 2 lakh, the villagers can get a computer and Internet services at a nominal cost in their villages. Through this, they are able to access a range of online services as well as file RTI applications through trained personnel who run these kendras. Providing value-added services like typing and photocopying, the village-based RTI activists, in most cases, are able to earn a stipend which takes care of their day-to-day expenses. “All JSKs have managed to break even, barring the Kanpur one where running costs are high, it being an urban centre,” says Shukla. The kendras have also become popular among service-oriented foreign and Indian students who want to know the real issues facing the country. Last year, 12 British and an equal number of Indian students interned with the JSK project and worked closely in rural conditions to use technology for transparent governance. Camping in the rural areas, these students have engaged with the issues at the ground level and have imparted computer and Internet skills to people to access information online.
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Raj Chengappa
WHEN we were in school, I guess we never knew how lucky we were. Those were simple times, and our needs were simple. I don’t think much has changed for schoolchildren in many private schools in India, but life is increasingly precarious for those who are dependent on state charity.
