New Delhi, July 9 (UNI): The Opposition in the Rajya Sabha today staged a walkout, expressing its dissatisfaction with Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh's reply to the debate on the death of children recently due to malnutrition and starvation in Maharashtra.
"The Minister has not given any assurance that he would order an inquiry into the deaths...we are boycotting the House," Sanjay Nirupam (Shiv Sena), who introduced a Calling Attention Motion on the issue, said as he led the Opposition members out of the House.
In his reply to the debate, Arjun Singh denied the opposition charge that the government had not paid any attention to the deaths of children in some villages of Maharashtra.
"There is no truth in the charge that the government is dealing with the issue insensitively," he said.
Expressing concern over the deaths, he said the Centre would take up the matter with the Maharashtra Government and invited Members of Parliament to give their suggestions for dealing with the problem.
Singh pointed out that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his address to the nation recently, also spoke about the efforts being made by the government to deal with malnutrition and starvation deaths.
Earlier, in a statement on the Calling Attention Motion, Minister of State for Human Resources Development Kanti Singh said the cause of deaths of nealy 8,300 children under the age of six years in 15 tribal districts of Maharashtra could not be solely attributed to malnutrition.
Indirectly confirming the newspaper reports claiming that over 9,000 children below six years had died of malnutrition in Maharashtra, Singh said the causes of deaths of over 8,291 children during March 2003 were premature births (11.41 per cent) and low birth weight (16.15 per cent) which could be attributable to the under-nutrition of mothers.
There were other reasons like pneumonia, birth asphyxia, convulsions for deaths and these were not related to malnutrition, the Minister said.
She said the problem of malnutrition was of multi-dimensional and inter-generational nature and has to be tackled through holistic and coordinated interventions in areas of food security, sanitation, safe drinking water, nutrition, family welfare and poverty alleviation.
She said nutritional and health programmes were implemented by various Ministries and Departments in various parts of the country, including the affected regions of Maharashtra, providing a package of services comprising of nutrition, immunisation, pre-school health check up, referral services and health education.
Singh said in Maharashtra, there were 370 sanctioned ICDS projects with 62,683 Anganwadi Centres of which 368 projects were operational in 57,270 Anganwadi Centres covering 40.56 lakh children and 6.09 lakh pregnant and lactating mothers.
There were frayed tempers in the House when CPI-M member Sarla Maheshwari attempted to blame the problem on previous NDA Government and its "systematic destruction" of Public Distribution System.
Others who participated in the debate included Dr P C Alexander and Gen Shankar Roy Chowdhury (both Ind.), Sushma Swaraj (BJP), M S Gill (Cong), N P Durga (TDP), R S Gavai (RPI) and Abdus Samad Samadani (IUML).
