A combination of factors compounds the problem: Doctors

The malnutrition ward at Mokhada’s hospital was built for 10 patients, but had 80 children admitted there on the day The Asian Age visited.

The malnutrition ward in the hospital at Palghar’s Mokhada taluka looks somewhat like the waiting room of a suburban train station, except that instead of luggage the women there carry underweight children in their arms. It’s a fairly large room, conceived for 10 beds that are now lined up against a wall, with a sea of mattresses strewn on the floor creating more space for a wave of admissions. The number of malnourished babies there is around 80 when The Asian Age visits. That is an unhealthy number for a hospital that still has no paediatricians, and for a district where over 600 children have died of malnutrition this year alone.

A junior doctor, Gopal Ghughe, sits in a cabin in one corner. He’s visiting this particular hospital since it has organised a medical camp for the day, and speaks to us while a woman with a toddler in her lap waits on a stool beside him. Dr Ghughe gets to the root of the problem at hand saying, in Hindi, “Underage marriages are a critical issue — a young girl who doesn’t get a balanced diet herself isn’t expected to give birth to a healthy child.”

He continues, “But it isn’t malnutrition per se that’s claiming lives. Children are dying because their immune systems are not strong enough to combat infections born out of unhealthy living conditions. We get cases of moderate acute malnutrition, where there’s still hope for a patient to survive. But in some cases of severe acute malnutrition, we have to refer the child to the district hospital at Palghar.”

He adds, though, that the parents are usually unwilling to make that journey since their hand-to-mouth existence leaves them with no money for the bus fare involved. And what compounds the problem is that households lack the sort of awareness which, if not from schools, comes from rural hospitals conducting regular medical camps, such as the one going on in Mokhada. So this means that the rampant malnutrition in Palghar has a combination of factors behind it, which need to be battled at every level.

Otherwise, even as Dr Ghughe speaks to The Asian Age, the toddler in the woman’s lap next to him might one day become yet another casualty in a war we are yet to win.