The Congress on Thursday accused the Centre of deliberately suppressing a national survey which reportedly says that child immunisation levels in Gujarat were shockingly low and proportion of underweight children in the State worse than national average.
Targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi over not releasing the survey, former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh said that it revealed that even poorer States like Bihar have done better in some areas than Gujarat.
Ramesh said the Ministry of Women and Child Development had carried out the survey from November 2013 to May 2014 with technical assistance from UNICEF. Over 105,483 households and 5600 Anganwadi centres were covered in the survey. Noting that Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at that time, he said, the findings of the survey exposes his model of development which was much trumpeted during lok Sabha polls.
“The survey has been “deliberately suppressed” for the past14 months as it showed that child immunisation levels in Gujarat were shockingly low and its proportion of hungry children and of stunting worse than national average, Ramesh said at the AICC briefing.
“The 56.2 per cent of the children aged 12-23 months who are fully immunised in Gujarat while in Bihar it is 60 per cent and the national average is around 65 per cent. The proportion of children below the age of 5 years who are stunted is 42 per cent in Gujarat which is higher than the national average of around 40 per cent. The proportion of children below the age of 5 years who are underweight is 33.5 per cent in Gujarat as compared to the national average of 29 per cent,” he said.
Taking a dig at the Prime Minister over the “Swachhchhta Abhiyan”, he said, the survey showed 60 per cent of households in rural Gujarat continue to defecate in the open as compared to the national average of 61.5 per cent. He allehged that government has not released the results of the survey despite questions being raised in Parliament over the delay.