Eight months old Amit Oraon of Panso village in Gumla has defeated malnourishment in three months and is now a healthy baby. Ayush Kumar Mahato, nine months old, has reached from severe acute malnutrition (SAM) to moderately acute malnutrition (MAM) during the same time period.
These are among few such children who have managed to fight malnutrition with the support of Karuna, a project of Vikas Bharti and Save the Children, operating in Gumla district.
Malnourishment has come up as one of the major concerns for the State as data of National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-4 show that 45.3 percent of children under the age of five years being stunted, 29 percent wasted and 47.8 percent being underweight, which is much higher than the national average of 38.4 percent, 21 percent and 35.7 percent, respectively.
With this concern, the Karuna was launched as a pilot project in Gumla Sadar block in November 2018. Under this programme, deep health screening of children from age of six to 59 months, is being done in 10 out of the total 25 panchayats in this block. Meanwhile, regular health checkups of children are being held at other 15 panchayats on a monthly basis.
A total of 5490 children were covered in the screening between November 2018 to January 2019 in which 285 children were found malnourished, 76 SAM and 209 MAM. After intervention, of the 76 SAM children identified, three have reached normal health, and 27 children have improved from SAM to MAM already.
A nutrition counselor has been appointed in each of the 10 panchayats who visits every household and measures the Middle Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC) of a child, which is the World Health Organization's approved parameter for checking malnourishment.
Chandra Kishore Sharma, project coordinator of Vikas Bharati said, "The SAM children are immediately referred to malnutrition treatment centre (MTC) but there are many whose parents are not able to take them. For such cases we haven Out Therapeutic Programme (OTP) under which we organize health checkup of children from the nearest primary health sub centre and provide them doses of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF)."
The children given the doses for not more than three months as if the dose does not help in improvement of health during the said time, it usually implies that there is a need of medical intervention in such cases. "We do not ask parents to depend on the RUTF but encourage them to use the locally available nutritious food like rice, wheat, ragi, vegetables, green leaves and others so that the child gets habituated of eating these things and his or health does not deteriorate when RUTF is stopped," Sharma said.
However, the complete success of the project is based on regular follow-ups and counseling of parents. Sharma said, “The parents have to be counseled on a regular basis to make them understand that malnutrition is a real problem and they should be concerned about it.” He pointed out that the project, if replicated by the government at a larger scale, can help in curbing malnutrition.