Baby, a Koraga woman, is left with only three of her four children. Her first, a son, died around five years ago, because he was sick. Her daughter is too weak to walk much.
Baby lives in a Koraga colony of around 24 houses in Madhya village in Chelar gram panchayat limits, around 20 km from Mangalore. The Koraga community is a Scheduled Tribe which has remained backward on all indicators. The community has also been classified as a Primitive Tribal Group.
Health officials who visited the colony on Friday suspected malnutrition amongst the children The situation only came to light because of a district-wide survey being undertaken to determine the housing status of the Koraga community.
While Ms. Baby refused to speak, Suguna, her relative, told The Hindu that Suhasini, one of Ms Baby's daughters could not walk more than a few steps at a time. She said that Suhasini was “too weak”. Ms. Baby's youngest is only a month old. The infant was the only one born in a hospital. The rest of the children were born at home, Ms. Suguna said.
None of the families in the colony have a ration card. Most of them earn their living by making baskets out of cane, which has been their traditional source of livelihood. Some of the men are daily wage workers or do other jobs like picking coconuts from trees. Ms. Suguna's husband died a few years ago and since then she sent her older son to work. He has studied until Standard IX, but she is proud of the fact that he can read and write, even in English. She too is literate, but most of the men and women are not.
Zilla Panchayat Chief Executive Officer K.N. Vijay Prakash, who headed the team that visited the colony, admitted that some of the children could be malnourished. He told presspersons that some of the children were underweight for their age and had not achieved the level of development that they should have. “By looking at them you can make out that they (children) are weak. Even the mothers look weak,” he told The Hindu .
He said that he had directed the health district apparatus to ascertain whether or not the children were malnourished and added that it would be known for certain by Saturday.
