Nutrition Programmes Face Fund Crunch

At a time, when there is widespread concern about the very high levels of child malnutrition in India, important nutrition programmes may be badly threatened due to budget cuts. The Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi expressed this very serious apprehension on 19 October at Delhi. She said that the main programme for child nutrition has been badly affected by budget cuts that have made it difficult to pay the wages of health and nutrition workers.

Here it may be recalled that in this year’s union budget the fund allocation for health, nutrition, child and women welfare was reduced drastically. Gandhi in her capacity as Minister for Women and Child Development had criticised this cruel cut even then. She had said at that time that she will be approaching the finance minister to restore the outlay. The finance ministry had said at that time that there is actually no budget cut in real terms as enough additional resources have been provided to the state governments to keep the overall budget for the social sector at earlier levels.