The grief written on Sundar Sawara’s face tells the story of a mother who lost her son about a week earlier. She speaks in a restrained voice, lifting her eyes once in a while only to cast them back to the damp, mud floor of her home. The woman from Khoch village in Palghar’s Mokhada tehsil doesn’t know any Hindi. All she knows is Marathi apart from her tribal tongue. But she’s also picked up a smattering of English, medical words like ‘doctor’, ‘nurse’ and ‘injection’, gleaned from dealing with life below the poverty line.
Ms Sawara’s son — Ishwar Sawara — died in September of complications related to malnutrition. He was two years and two months old. If he had lived about a decade longer, Ishwar could have been admitted to a school that’s just 20 metres from his house in the middle of the Sahyadri hills, a beautiful but bleak place from where rattling jeeps connect locals to the rest of the world.
This school enrols students from Class VIII onwards, and a blackboard on a visit there reads, ‘What is the internet ’ In another room, a box-like computer literally gathers dust. It had been sanctioned last year. But the institution is a non-granted one. That apart, electricity continues to be at a premium here, let alone the internet. So there haven’t been any practical computer classes at Chhatrapati Shivaji Vidyaniketan in Khoch yet, meaning children in the village still roll cycle tyres with a stick to pass their time, and then go home when it’s dark. Seeing their kids die Ms Sita Shiva Wagh is another mother bereaved about a week ago, who lives about a half-hour walk away from Ms Sawara’s house. Her son’s name was Sagar Wagh. He was barely two and a half years old. Carrying her daughter in her lap, Ms Wagh remembers Sagar’s death. Like Ms Sawara before her, she leans against the wall while talking, seemingly weary with life’s struggles, downcast eyes hiding the shame of unbridled poverty claiming her child.
A blackened clay oven juts out of the ground in one corner in her hut. There, Ms Wagh lights the evening fire once a day, usually to make a khichdi with rice and lentils, or just rice if there’s nothing else around. Their only other meal comes from the local anganwadi centre a few feet away, where a gruel of rice, lentils and jaggery is mashed up in the afternoon for 39 beneficiary families. But instead of solving the problem, this daily diet often ends in contributing to the global image of malnutrition — that of a child with a carbohydrate-heavy pot belly and protein-deficient chest, arms and legs sticking to the bones.
The black soot on the clay oven, meanwhile, is a silent killer that exposes malnourished toddlers like Sagar to fatal infections. Ms Wagh could have known that, had she not been an illiterate bride married at 16, now a bereaved mother who’s also a working woman aged 18 years old. As things stand though, the government machinery over the years has failed so far to rid India of the societal tragedy of child marriages. That’s the root of the problem at hand. For, a girl who eats barely twice a day herself isn’t meant to carry a healthy child in her womb. And if she does, a free LPG cylinder under the Centre’s ‘Ujjwala’ scheme must reach her home as promised. More eggs, bananas and, ideally, milk mixed with baby powder should also be made available at the anganwadi centres. Plus, rural schools must realise the dream of ‘Digital India’, so that the children studying there have more than just rattling jeeps connecting them to the rest of the world.
But first, hospitals in villages need more doctors. They are the ones who can bring about real awareness at the grassroots level, be it through medical camps or individual counselling of the stream of women carrying underweight babies flowing in and out of their chambers. Otherwise, there is bound to be a deep stain on our collective conscience, while the statistics concerning malnutrition-related deaths keep getting stacked up with names like Ishwar Sawara and Sagar Wagh.
