THIS is the era of scams, but still one had expected that at least a few things would be sacrosanct. One that certainly should have been exempted was children’s health. But as the latest Planning Commission review has disclosed, money meant even for that has been conveniently siphoned off. Close to Rs 3,000 crore worth of funds allocated by the government during 2008-2009, the year of study, for Supplementary Nutrition Programme (SNP), the most critical component of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), has vanished on the way without benefiting the country’s children between six months and six years of age. That amounts to an astounding 56.4 per cent of the total budgetary allocation of Rs 5,383 crore for the year. No wonder the world’s largest child health programme is virtually bed ridden.
All dirty tricks of the trade have been used to bleed the 36-year-old programme. The huge fraud has been perpetrated through anganwadi centres (AWCs) whose sorry state The Tribune has been highlighting repeatedly. First of all, many of the eligible children were just not registered. Even out of those who were registered, only 64 per cent were given supplementary nutrition, that too only for 16 days a month on an average, making it a total of 192 days a year, whereas the Supreme Court had mandated that this should be done for 300 days.
The review gives sickening details of how all this was done. It says that in some areas where AWCs are given cash every month, there is a nexus between the Child Development Project Officer, the AWC supervisor and even bank, panchayat and anganwadi workers (AWWs) to siphon off cash. In some other cases, contractors are supplying food items and money gets diverted through the manipulation of accounts and entries in the registers of beneficiaries the AWWs are supposed to maintain. Since this has been going on for many years, it appears that there is no monitoring mechanism in place at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment