http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/madhya_pradesh_epicentre_of_hunger.php
NDTV recently covered the state of malnutrition in the districts where RMF is working in Madhya Pradesh. They give a great overview of the challenges we are facing.
Widespread malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh, India – A note from the field
Jhabua, Alirajpur, Khandwa, Khargone June 2009
Malnutrition is one of the most serious and large scale health problems facing the Indian state today:
- 46% of children under 5 in India are malnourished
- Over 60% of the children under 5 in Madhya Pradesh are malnourished – the country’s highest malnutrition rate. Out of these 6 million malnourished children in MP, 1.3 have severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and another 1 million have moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) [1]
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- MP’s tribal districts are the worst hit in the country because of their cultural, geographical, and economical isolation with up to 100% malnutrition in some villages.
Tags: drought, field report, India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, monsoon
June 17, 2009
By Dr Rubina Mumtaz
Displacement is an inadequate, meaningless word when it is used to describe the trauma of being wrenched from your home and forcibly dislocated to a far flung place not of your choice.
Imagine an ordinary day in your life. Food is warm on the table, the children are out playing and you’ve send your other half or your teenage son to get bread from the bakery. Suddenly the shrill explosions of bombs landing in your backyard break the tranquility. The panic, the chaos, the screaming, the children outside; are they alive or not, people running helter-skelter. In an instant, life becomes all about survival, the very lives and safety of your loved ones. What do you pick up from your abode as you make the panic-induced on-spot decision to run for your life? Your clothes? Your money? Your identity papers/credit cards? Or do you just grab the hands of your loved ones and run? This is what happened to over 2 million people. They fled for their lives with nothing on them except the clothes on their backs.
Hence the words ‘inadequate and meaningless’ to describe displacement. The internally displaced people (IDP) are people like you and me, who had perfectly good lives till the Taliban decided to invade this tranquil scenic mountains of Swat in Northern Pakistan. The Taliban did not come overnight. They slowly insidiously infiltrated into the area, preaching about Islam, missionary in their approach to impose the Islamic Sharia (Islamic law) that assured peace, quick justice, law and order plus the promise of heaven hereafter. They recruited the bright eyed youth with immediate lucrative economic and power-based returns. The government of Pakistan initially turned a blind eye; it began to acknowledge the Taliban only when the metastasis of their networks reached into neighboring districts of Malakand.
June 17, 2009
By Dr. Rubina Mumtaz
The freak monsoon of 2008 wrecked havoc across Pakistan. The North West Frontier Province and its adjoining tribal areas had the most casualties where flash floods killed 200 people overnight, literally sweeping away property and livestock of over 114 villages comprising of 11,200 houses affecting over 67,000 people. Scores of people were marooned by the floods and had to be rescued by military helicopters over several days. The scale of damage was declared high since there was no effective warning mechanism and many of these people living below poverty line had encroached into waterway active flood plains living in makeshift mud houses. 40,000 acres of cultivated land were also badly affected ruining the crops and making the survival of these already homeless people all the more stark.
The National Disaster Management Committee of Pakistan and the Emergency Relief Cell housed these homeless flood victims in tent villages in Charsadda and Mardan. It is a well established fact that unhygienic and crowded living conditions of tent villages render its populations vulnerable to a wide range of diseases.
RMF collaborated with Relief Foundation, a local, private, non-profit NGO that works for poverty reduction, improving quality of life of the ultra-poor and provides free medical relief to the vulnerable in far flung areas of Pakistan, to set up four free one-day medical camps for these flood victims. With a volunteer team of 15 male and female doctors and 9 paramedics and a coordinating team of RMF health staff, over 2,800 flood victims were treated during the first 2-day camp of Feb 15-16, 2009. The doctors covered all specialties inclusive of orthopedic surgeons, dentists, ophthalmologists and pediatricians. The process conduct of patient flow followed a simple systematic route. All patients after initial registration were screened by general physicians in the filter clinic who also provided PHC. Subject cases were referred to the relevant specialist. Complicated cases were referred to tertiary level hospitals in Peshawar and Mardan. Prescriptions were taken by the patients to the pharmacy where free medicine was distributed. Most of our volunteers are physicians on the faculty of tertiary level teaching hospitals in Peshawar, thereby in a position to facilitate the referral cases on their home grounds.
Dear RMF Team and Friends,
These are the final days leading up to our Photography Event Journey to Armenia on June 12, 2009 benefiting our new project in Armenia:
So far we have been receiveing a great response from the community: 12 photographs have already been sold, and we keep getting confirmations from dignitaries and stakeholders planning to attend.
In the past few weeks we have also received some notable media attention:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24kristof.html
Nicholas Kristof writes about malnutrition in Africa, but touches on some of the same issues we face with our malnutrition eradication program in India. Malnutrition in India is most often not a result of the lack of food, but a lack of proper nutrition compounded by a lack of education about what constitutes proper nutrition and young child feeding practices.
Malnutrition eradication approaches in India over the past 30 years have focused on food security, trying to ensure that families across the country have access to staple foods. This has resulted in a well developed food distribution system, even in emergency circumstances, but has not achieved reduction in malnutrition – there actually have been increases in some areas.
I’ve included two maps below, the first which maps malnutrition for children under 5 years old, and the second which maps food insecurity in India – rating households’ access to food. You’ll see that there is a close connection between food insecurity and malnutrition, but this isn’t the only element at play. Madhya Pradesh, the state with the highest, “extremely alarming” malnutrition rate is not the state with the highest level of food insecurity.
Tags: malnutrition, nutrition
Field in Umri, Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. April 2009
Last week I blogged about our program launch. We realize that it is unusual in the NGO world for an organization to launch such an ambitious initiative in such a short period of time. While in the ideal world we could have spent many more months planning, doing baselines assessments, and fundraising, we know that we need to act as soon as possible with the resources we have because if we wait too long human lives are our opportunity costs.
Tags: draught, India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, migration
Dr. Fabian Toegel addressing men and women representing over 40 tribal villages in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention. April 25th, 2009
After almost two months of planning, field assessments, and speaking to everyone from mothers of malnourished children to politicians we launched the first phase of our malnutrition eradication program in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh with two trainings in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention over the past week. Our intervention will be a long-term, holistic initiative, with not just trainings but consistent onsite activities and follow up over the next two years, but this past week we started with the first step, a training to create awareness and to increase referrals of severe acute malnutrition to government centers.
Tags: Add new tag, health, India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, Related Links, tribal health
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