Fund rethink

New Delhi, Feb. 15: States may for the first time have to share the burden of feeding India’s youngest citizens with the Centre.

This will be a “punishment” to states for failing to reach the country’s malnourished millions even three decades after a child development scheme was launched.

The ministry of women and child development is planning the biggest shake-up of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) to make states pay 25 per cent of the funds that were earlier provided almost exclusively by Delhi.

The Centre feels the states are “casual” about the implementation of the scheme as they do not fund it.

Started in 1975, the ICDS — recognised by the UN as one of the world’s largest early child care programmes — focuses on children under six.

Supplementary nutrition — in addition to main meals — is funded equally by the Centre and states, but the allocation for this section is barely a few per cent of the total funding for the scheme.

States have now been sent a proposal recommending a change in the funding pattern, government sources said.

The idea is to affix responsibility on states. “Currently, we fund the scheme, but also get all the blame, particularly from the Supreme Court. If they can’t share the blame, let them at least share the funds,” a senior official in the women and child development ministry said.

The apex court has repeatedly hauled up the Centre for failing to deliver on either its own promises or the court’s orders on the scheme.

The UPA government had promised in its common minimum programme that it would universalise the scheme.

Answering questions in Parliament in late 2007, women and child development minister Renuka Chowdhury had conceded that the ICDS was reaching only around 60 million children under six. The 2001 census had showed that India had over 160 million children in this age group.

But state governments are unlikely to accept the Centre’s proposal meekly.

“The truth is that we do not receive funds on time, which is why projects get delayed. By transferring some of the funding to us, the Centre wants an excuse when it is hauled up by the Supreme Court,” a state women and child development minister said.