Bhopal, (WFS) - Subhash Bhil, a tribal from Hingua village, Badwani district, Madhya Pradesh, recently lost two of his children to starvation. Subhash is landless and has no means of livelihood. This year (2004), the panchayat (village council) could provide work for only two days and each day's work fetched Subhash only Rs 20 - not enough to feed his family of nine. The family survived on samai, a wild grass which usually grows around the village pond. The adivasis (tribals) dry the grain from the grass, powder it and use this to make chappattis to eat.

According to Seema Prakash Michael from the NGO Spandan Samaj Sevi Samiti (part of the Right to Food Campaign), there are 40 more children in this village who are severely malnourished and in grave danger. Tribals in 24 surrounding villages face a similar crisis, according to the NGO. Samai has never been the traditional food of tribals - it is neither nutritious nor filling. But in recent years, this is the only diet most have. The tribals of Tikamgarh district have made it their daily 'food'.

The tribal community in Jatasankar village, Chatterpur district, suffers the same way. Recently, eight of the 32 malnourished children died after being on a samai diet for many months. The authorities argued that the deaths were 'unusual' as samai was the community's 'traditional' food!

Shyamlal, who lives in Mahalwari village in Khalwa, narrates how starvation and debt are destroying families. Shyamlal borrowed some grain and Rs 800 from a moneylender to feed his four children and take them to a doctor as they were often ill. He now has to pay back Rs 800 (1US$=Rs 45), plus double the amount of grain he borrowed.

Increasingly, tribal pockets in MP are reporting deaths of children caused due to malnutrition; activists and local people say the deaths are caused due to starvation over a long period of time. The Right to Food Campaign support group says that in MP, 55 per cent children of 0-6 year's age group are malnourished and there have been 169 malnutrition deaths since the beginning of 2004.

The state government, however, continues to deny that the deaths have occurred due to long-term malnutrition or starvation and maintains that the children died due to diseases like malaria, measles or diarrhoea.

Malnourishment is caused due to lack of nutritious food over a long period of time. A malnourished person has little immunity and is very vulnerable to diseases. In most malnutrition deaths in MP, the children initially complained of fever, vomiting and diarrhoea - which were not life-threatening. But for a malnourished child, these situations can prove to be fatal. This explains why, in almost all the malnutrition deaths reported, the prima facie cause is often diarrhoea or fever with spells of vomiting.

A 2001 study conducted by the Center for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (a Pune-based organisation working on health issues) warned that 80 per cent children from the Bhil tribal community are severely malnourished. This report was submitted to the central and state governments and the Supreme Court in the same year. Yet little has been done to address the issue.
 
According to data provided by the Bal Sanjeevani Abhiyan (government-run development programme for children), out of the 10 million children in the age group 0-6, barely 22 per cent have been reached by the government's Integrated Child Development Scheme which aims to provide a reasonable level of nutrition to poor children.  Experts have also commented on the problem of low birth weight babies in the area. In MP, the under-five mortality rate is 87 per 1000 live births compared to Kerala, which reports 19 per 1,000 live births.  Experts say low birth weight babies - 55.1 per cent in MP - are more vulnerable to malnutrition deaths.

The allocations made by the state government for nutrition has shown little or no increase in the recent years. The prescribed financial norm indicated by the Centre is Rs 1 per beneficiary per day on an average, which is to include cost of fuel, food, transport, administration and condiments. The norm was set in 1991 and has not been revised since then. As against this, the MP government has spent only Rs 0.49 per beneficiary per day on Supplementary Nutrition Programme (SNP).

Activists say that the tribal communities in MP were not so badly off until very recently. They were self-sufficient and got adequate nutritious food from the forests. But haphazard development and the negligence of the government have now pushed them towards starvation.

An important source of income of the Gound and Baiga tribals, inhabiting the Sidhi district of MP, was through the collection of tendu leaves from the forests. But the stringent laws forbidding the tribals from entering the forest area and the process of deforestation have deprived them of their regular income.

The condition of the tribals in Jhabua district is pathetic. They have stopped sowing traditional crops - kagra and kangni - as there is no market for them. Instead, they borrow money from moneylenders to buy hybrid seeds and grow soyabean, cotton and tomato. But their crops hardly reach the market; the middlemen sell them to retailers and keep the profits. Eventually, they end up paying most of their earnings to the moneylenders, who sometimes charge an interest rate of 200 per cent. The tribal families in the area have debts ranging from Rs 30,000-60,000.

So far, the Madhya Pradesh government has not taken any concrete steps to break this cycle of hunger and debt and rescue tribal children from starvation deaths.

Sachin Kumar Jain & Priya Pillai