The Working Group for Children Under Six of the Right to Food Campaign are appalled that the current legal guarantee of “hot cooked meals” for children attending anganwadis has been diluted by providing the option of “ready to eat food” in the recently-approved draft by the Empowered Group of Ministers.

Members of the Right to Food Campaign believe that the present bill seems to be more about “creating markets and protecting corporate interests than the interests of children.” Even for the guarantee of supplementary food, no minimum standards have been spelt out in the sharp contrast to the NAC draft which was in compliance with the Supreme Court orders, activists, including Jean Dreze and Dr Arun Gupta, complain. Key issues relating to the management of severe malnutrition, nutritional counselling and other programmatic issues requiring legal guarantees have, been wholly omitted.
The “life cycle” of a child, the revised draft states, starts at birth, and the recommended “food” for babies under the age of six months is breast milk alone. What support is the Food Bill offering to children in this critical group age which forms the foundation of the child’s entire physical, cognitive and social development and is also the phase in which malnutrition tends to set in? While the provision of maternity entitlements as social support to breastfeeding is available for women working in the Central government in the six-month maternity leave, no maternity entitlements have been listed out for over 15 crores women working in the informal sector.
Further, there are no accountability provisions — the entire grievance redressal process proposed by the NAC has been discarded and replaced with token provisions. Contrary to the government’s claim the present draft has diluted most of the core principles of the NAC’s earlier draft.