|
Children
younger than 6 years of age account for a sixth of
India’s population, and yet just 1 percent of the
federal government’s budget is spent on them.
In a
country where a quarter of the population is estimated
to live on $1 a day or less, lack of state funding is a
serious deficiency in ensuring that children get a
decent start.
Four out
of five toddlers in
India
are anemic. Less than half have received all recommended
vaccines. The chances of a child’s survival—at least for
the poorest 20 percent of the population—are worse than
in Bangladesh or Vietnam.
Neither
the lawmakers nor the media have done much to highlight
the plight of the very young.
This
long-standing neglect has now become a major problem.
Correcting the sad state of affairs will require a
“massive increase in financial allocations,” a group of
doctors, social workers and economists said in a recent
report.
The
working group on children under 6, set up at the behest
of the government’s economic-planning agency, estimates
the cost of reaching out to 80 million children and 10
million pregnant and breast-feeding women with day-care
centers, medicines, counseling and nutrition—including
eggs for a protein-rich diet—at 300 billion rupees ($7.6
billion) a year.
That’s
one-and-a-half months of taxes that the government
collects from levies on personal incomes and corporate
profits.
Can
India afford to devote such a large share of fiscal
resources to young children, putting their needs ahead
of other claimants in society?
Health
matters
The
wisdom of public investment in early-life human capital
is now fairly well-established.
Research
by Mark Huggett at
Georgetown
University
in Washington and two other economists suggests that
differences in initial human capital—acquired before 20
years of age—matter more for how people fare later in
life than either being born rich or possessing higher
learning abilities.
The
question, therefore, isn’t so much about whether the
state should invest more in very young children, but how
and where it should spend the money to ensure maximum
gains.
It isn’t
a trivial issue.
Shantayanan Devarajan, the chief economist for
South Asia at the World Bank, says the determinants of child
mortality in poor countries lie mostly outside the realm
of conventional health care. For instance, improving
access to safe drinking water can probably do more to
save young lives in
India
than boosting state spending on nutrition.
“Health
inputs have only a weak relationship with child
mortality,’’ Devarajan says on his web site.
Wrong
priorities
This
isn’t to say Indian taxpayers should resent paying for
an egg in each young child’s meal every other day, which
is what the committee recommends. But surely, provision
of clean water, for which the panel has very little
advice to offer, should take precedence?
Likewise, if the Indian government heeds the committee’s
suggestion on cash grants for pregnant women, it should
give an even bigger monetary award to women who delay
childbirth.
The
fewer the number of children born in extreme poverty,
the smaller will be the problem of their neglect.
Population-control efforts in
India
have lost their urgency.
The
fertility rate, which stands at 2.7 children per woman,
is likely to miss the government’s target of 2.1 by
2010. And after India hits that rate, the population
will still take another 35 years to stabilize.
Saving
Bihar
In parts
of the country, overpopulation, ignorance and poverty
have reinforced one another to produce a hostile
environment for young children.
Take the
eastern Indian state of
Bihar, which is more populous than
Germany
and poorer than Ethiopia.
It’s
also feudal, lawless and largely untouched by the rapid
economic growth that’s pulling millions of Indians out
of poverty every year.
Only 17
percent of the women in
Bihar had access to three rounds of antenatal care before their
last child was born, the National Family Survey of 2006
said.
And yet,
the fertility rate in
Bihar is as high
as 4 children per woman; and the figure has been rising
in the past few years, partly because of a strong
preference for sons.
Contraceptive usage is less than half of the national
average; only 35 percent of women have heard of
HIV/AIDS, compared with 57 percent nationally.
There’s
no way the plight of children can be reversed in Bihar
with nutrition alone; controlling the birth rate,
something that the Indian government seems to have
overlooked lately, is crucial.
If eggs
are important for
India’s
future, condoms may not be any less so. |
