By Shradha Chettri | New Delhi | Updated: June 19, 2017
The Indian Express visited 14 Anganwadis, and found similar problems
almost everywhere...
A healthy
meal and a stepping stone for school — anganwadis in the city have two key
responsibilities. The Indian Express explores the problems at each front.
Five-year-old
Naseem does not go to school, but that doesn’t mean he can stay at home after
breakfast. As soon as the clock strikes 9 am, Naseem leaves home,
unenthusiastically dragging his feet across a small drain filled with plastic.
He eventually reaches a small room on the ground floor of A block, New
Seemapuri, in northeast Delhi.
Six others,
some younger than Naseem, are already there, with an old fan and a rug to keep
them comfortable. A few tattered charts with alphabets and numbers hang on the
wall.
Naseem is
greeted by his teacher (officially a ‘worker’), a woman in her 30s. She marks
him ‘present’, and he sits down to play with the plastic toys scattered on the
floor.
He spends
the next four-and-a-half hours at the anganwadi centre (AWC), which is supposed
to provide him supplementary nutrition and prepare him for Class I. But his
mother, Shabana, has a grouse: “He has been going to the anganwadi for over two
years. Forget learning the alphabets, he still doesn’t know how to hold a
pencil, or colour.”
The Indian
Express visited 14 anganwadis, and found similar problems almost everywhere.
Shabana
still sends her son to the AWC because that is the only time she gets to do
tailoring work. Her husband is a daily wager. The couple have three other
children — two study in a nearby municipal school and one in a Delhi government
school.
As Naseem
plays, another woman walks in holding two children, aged three and four, by
their hands. She makes them sit alongside Naseem. She is a ‘helper’ at the AWC,
responsible for bringing children aged six and below from the neighbourhood to
the centre — under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme.
Hard to swallow
The ICDS —
under the Ministry of Women and Child Development, and looked after by the WCD
department in each state — has been in place since 1975. It was restructured
under the 12th Five-Year Plan to ensure holistic development of children aged
six and below.
The aim was
to reduce anaemia and child mortality rate by giving supplementary nutrition —
especially to malnourished children — and to improve early learning outcomes.
Naseem’s
teacher is meant to keep children engrossed till 12.30 pm, when food arrives.
She makes them narrate a poem, but eventually they get fidgety and say they
want to go home. The two women assure them they will get food soon. Eventually,
men carrying two steel containers walk in around 11 am.
The food is to be distributed to children up
to six years and pregnant and nursing mothers in the neighbourhood.
Today, the meal comprises pulao and salted
chana (black gram). While there’s a different meal every day (see box), the
snack alternates between black chana and white matar. The children — there are
6,97,158 in anganwadis across the city — know each day’s menu by heart. Even
before the helper lifts the lid, Naseem says,“Aaj toh pulao milega.
Mujhe toh sirf meetha dalia acha lagta hai, jo kal
milega.”
The children
line up with bowls. Some sit and eat, while Naseem runs home with the food. He
keeps it in the kitchen and asks his mother for lunch. “Many children don’t
like the food at the anganwadi. Naseem usually comes home and eats lunch,” says
Shabana.
Sarita
Dhariwal, a worker at an AWC a few blocks from Naseem’s home, explains why: “It
is impossible to eat this rice. The chana has no salt. But children still eat
the food because there is no one to cook for them.” Dhariwal, who has been at
the centre since 2012, says the quality of food has deteriorated with each
passing year. “It is only when there is news of an inspection that the quality
improves,” she says.
Insufficient staffers
The food at
the AWCs is supplied by non-profit organisations (NPOs) empanelled by the WCD
department. There are 22 in the city and work is allotted through a tendering
process. Each kitchen prepares food for 30-40 anganwadis.
The meal is
supposed to provide 500 calories and 12-15 grams protein to children aged
between 6-72 months, and 600 calories and 18-20 grams protein to pregnant and
nursing mothers.
Dhariwal
says she has raised the matter with her supervisor and the Child Development
and Project Officer (CDPO). Since there are only 37 CDPOs for 95 projects, an
officer cannot visit each centre under her daily, which means quality tends to
slip. “Apart from visiting the centre, we also have a lot of administrative
work. It is not possible to keep a record of every centre,” says a supervisor
in south Delhi, who did not wish to be named.
There should
be one CDPO for each project, but most positions haven’t been filled for years.
Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who
recently took additional charge of the WCD department, acknowledges the
problem. “As services are no longer under the jurisdiction of the Delhi
government, it has become difficult to appoint officers,” he says. For now, the
minister has asked DANICS and ad hoc IAS officers to visit two anganwadi
centres on Saturdays.
With few
takers, most of the food at anganwadis in Sangam Vihar — one of Asia’s largest
unauthorised colonies — is often thrown away. There are frequent complaints
that the anganwadis have been serving the same snack every day. “Children get
tired of eating the same thing. Since we have to keep them here till 12.30 pm,
I buy biscuits for them,” says Suman Lata, a worker at AWC No. 100 in Hamdard
Nagar.
Just like at
her anganwadi, most other centres only have 10-15 children registered. Lata
acknowledges that the number of children in the neighbourhood is far higher.
Former
chairperson of the child welfare committee, Raj Mangal Prasad, says, “The
government had decided that commercial ventures will not supply (food) and that
work will be given to NPOs. But, ultimately, these commercial ventures started
NPOs. The profit in food distribution is huge. Then there are supervisors who
work with these NPOs, so monitoring quality has been a huge challenge.”
Each AWC
gets food based on the number of children and women registered. NPOs are paid
Rs 6 per day to supply meals for children below six years, Rs 9 per day for
malnourished children, and Rs 7 per day for pregnant and nursing mothers.
A learning issue
Like
Shabana, many other parents The Indian Express spoke to
shared concerns about their children not learning enough.
Anganwadis
are ideally supposed to serve as Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE)
centres, with Sisodia bringing in a fixed curriculum to be taught to children.
By the time children leave the anganwadi, they should know the names of
colours, seasons and learn how to write letters and numbers.
Four-year-old
Rehan at anganwadi No. 104 in New Seemapuri plays with an alphabet cube, but
doesn’t know what it is. “Mujhe nahi pata ye sab
kya hai,” he says. The helper brushes it off, saying Rehan is not
regular.
But Rajiv
Kumar of local NGO Pardarshita says the problem with most anganwadis is a
dearth of workers responsible for teaching.
“Helpers are
supposed to collect children and serve food, while workers do the teaching. But
many positions are lying vacant,” he says.
At Rehan’s
AWC, too, the worker has been on leave for a while now. That many anganwadi employees
haven’t been paid for as long as four months doesn’t help. A worker gets Rs
5,000 a month, while a helper makes Rs 2,500.
“When we ask
supervisors, they say we will be paid soon. If they expect us to work properly,
they should also pay us,” says a worker at a centre in Lal Kuan.
Those who
are regular complain that they haven’t been trained enough. “The government
sends new guidelines and course sheets, but we don’t get training. We have to
know how to teach children. Some workers have not been trained in the last 10
years,” says Kavita Chauhan, an anganwadi worker at Lal Kuan.
Chauhan, who
studied till Class X, was hired as a worker in 2012. She was trained for a week
when she joined — and that was about it. During training, they were taught how
to fill registers, weigh children and maintain a record of malnourished kids.
How well
that data is maintained is another story. Sunita, a resident of E-block in
Sunder Nagri, says that when her daughter was three years old, she weighed just
3.7 kg — much below the WHO standard of 10.7 kg.
Sunita,
whose daughter is now six, says she used to visit the AWC near her home to
weigh her child and get vaccinations. But no one told her the child was
malnourished. When NGO Pardarshita conducted a survey between 2013 and 2014,
they found the child needed immediate medical attention and took her to the
hospital. Till date, she has not fully recovered.
Of the 580
children weighed in just one block in Sunder Nagri, 65 were severely
malnourished and 131 were malnourished. This is in stark contrast to a monthly
report of the WCD department across the city during the same
period, which showed only 201 children aged six or below were malnourished.
“Anganwadis don’t have proper weighing machines… Many provide inaccurate
measurements,” says Kumar.
Dhariwal
says there is just one weighing machine for around 10 AWCs in the area. “We get
to keep the machine for three days every month to weigh children at the centre
and in the neighbourhood,” she says.
As per the
National Family Health Survey (2015-2016), 27% of children in the city aged
five or below were underweight, up from 26.1% in 2005-06. Similarly, 62.6% were
anaemic, up from 57% in 2005-06. Field workers say the only way forward is to
set up a state food commission, as mandated by the Food Security Act 2013.
“Section 6
of the Act is about malnutrition. The ICDS not recording this properly is a
violation of the Act. The only solution is to establish a state food commission
as a monitoring committee for such schemes,” says Arvind Singh of NGO Matri
Sudha, which works in the field of nutrition and education.
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