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Hunger and pain mark a child's life in tale of two Indias
Sydney Morning Herald - March 17, 2012
When The Saturday Age first visited Ujala in 2009, she was four months old and weighed just 1.5 kilograms. The family have not weighed her since. They do not have money for a doctor, nor can they see the point after their daughter was abandoned by the hospital last time, told that she wouldn't survive.
Ujala is three-and-a-half now, but it's doubtful she has put on more than a few kilograms since. She cannot walk, speak or even sit properly unaided. All she can do is cry, a thin whine she makes when she is hungry.
The lack of food for her and her mother in those first critical months have crippled her body and cruelled her brain development. She will never go to school, or work. "She is not going to improve," her father Raju says, holding his slack-limbed daughter in his arms. "How can I not worry for her? She is my child."
Ujala has a brother, born in a year the rains fell. At 11 months, Roshan is runny-nosed and restless, a chubby stumbling toddler who towers over his elder sister. But this is not just the story of Ujala – it is the tale of two Indias.
The train line near Ujala's dusty village runs to Mumbai, India's glitzy financial capital. In the same week The Saturday Age revisited Ujala, India brought down its budget, promising gross domestic product growth of 7.6 and 8.6 per cent over the next two years.
"India remains one of the fastest-growing economies of the world," Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement boasted.
But for all its economic growth, India remains home to half the world's poor and hungry. More than 400 million people here exist on less than a dollar a day.
In parts of India – like Ujala's village of Paretha, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh – child malnutrition rates are worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. The hunger and malnutrition survey released by the government found 42 per cent of Indian children were underweight, 59 per cent stunted by lack of food.
India has long been earmarked for greatness on the promise of its "youth dividend": its massive young population that will see it surpass an ageing China as the most populous country on earth, with the largest workforce.
But ill-fed and uneducated, that youth dividend could become India's burden. A Lancet survey found that malnourished children earned 20 per cent less than those who had enough to eat.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has urged India to halt its obsession with GDP figures. "You have to see how our lives are improving. India may have the second-fastest growth rate but we have the largest number of undernourished children in the world," he told India's Economic Times daily.
"In all the human development categories – girls' education, basic medical care... we are the worst performer among South Asian countries. "My worry is the sentiment of the country gets upset when it [GDP growth rate] goes from 8 per cent to 7 per cent. The sentiment of India doesn't get affected by the higher number of undernourished children than anywhere else."
However, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the country's childhood malnutrition figures "a national shame".
In the three years Ujala has barely grown, her country's wealth has increased by $500 billion. Her family's has barely moved.
Her father is the youngest of five brothers. There are 15 in the extended family that live in the two-room mudbrick house in the village of Paretha, huddled around a thin ribbon of black tar connecting it to the outside world.
Raju and his brothers leave home for several months at a time, seeking work at farms or brick kilns. They send almost all their money home, but it's never enough.
The family also farms the land it owns, just over half a hectare of stony, unirrigated ground a few kilometres from the village. They grow soya beans as a cash crop, instead of wheat for their own tables, but they can only plant for the monsoon rains, which grow steadily less reliable.
Reetika Khera from the Delhi School of Economics says while economic growth will eventually raise standards of living, the benefits of India's past decade of growth have varied wildly.
"There has been an increase in income inequality in the past 10 to 20 years and the people who are poor, who are at the very bottom end of the distribution network, are desperately poor in India, and they cannot wait for 10 years for their boat to be lifted by this rising tide," Dr Khera told The Saturday Age.
Government programs to feed India's poor have been stymied by bureaucracy and corruption. At one time in the state of Jharkhand, up to 90 per cent of the grain allocated by government to feed the poorest never reached its destination.
Ujala's entire family has one ration card, which entitles them to 35 kilograms of wheat grain per month. It's about two kilograms each, even when it does arrive.
"We can't rely on it," Ujala's mother Geeta says. "We don't know what they give us, one month or the next. The government doesn't help us. The government doesn't care. "For now," she says, gently cradling her daughter, "the situation is better, but the future is uncertain."
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