<<Citizen Selection Procedure

Click on the names to view details

Prashant Kumar Dubey
Citizen-nominee for RTI Awards 2009 2009
Reference Number: C92
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Organization: Vikas Samvad and Right to Food Campaign-Madhya Pradesh
Nominated by: self
Why is he short-listed for RTI Awards 2009?
For using RTI and the Media together to make child malnutrition one of the most important social, political and electoral issues in Madhya Pradesh.
Dubey and his colleagues Sachin Jain and Roli Shivhare at Madhya Pradesh support group of the Right to Food Campaign have been using RTI to uncover the scale and seriousness of hunger, malnutrition and starvation among children of the state and government’s response to the problem.
Drawing strength from the ongoing Right to Food Case at Supreme Court -- PUCL vs Union of India and Others, Writ Petition (Civil) 196 of 2001 – Dubey has also been phenomenally successful in engaging the Media in highlighting the issue of malnutrition among children.
As the Media took up the issue to the hilt, Madhya Pradesh has arguably become the most scrutinized specimen of government’s failure in responding to child malnutrition in the country.
Dubey was also successful in persuading the main opposition party to make child malnutrition an issue in 2008 assembly elections and take a stand on how the problem should be addressed by the government.
Madhya Pradesh government has since committed itself to hiking public expenditure on supplementary food per child per day from Rs 2.70 to Rs six and opening 20,000 new Anganwadis.
The government has been compelled to formulate a state nutrition policy.
The intense Media focus also compelled the government to shelve a controversial trial of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) in a district and return to culturally suitable food.

Details of the nomination

Prashant Kumar Dubey, who belongs to Sobhapur village in Sohapur block of Hoshangabad district, had his first foray into community work while he was still in his teens. He was one of the 15-20 school-boys who called themselves Kshetriya Yuva Sangathan and started to engage themselves in development issues of their village.
Dubey did BSc. (Maths), B.Lib, and Masters in both sociology and social work at Barkatullah University-Bhopal.
In 1997, he joined Saandhya Madhya Bharat, an evening newspaper published from Bhopal, as a reporter and had a year-long stint there.
For about seven years since 2000, Dubey also acted in a large number of street plays and some TV serials.
In 2001, he got his first opportunity to understand the issue of poverty on a state-wide canvas when he started to work on Participatory Rural Appraisal and later Participatory Poverty Appraisal, two ActionAid-funded projects to assess development needs and poverty in several districts of Madhya Pradesh.
Dubey also worked on another ActionAid-funded project called Bachpan, which helped him appreciate the pernicious effect of poverty on children.
With the Right to Food Case at Supreme Court bringing food security into sharper focus, Dubey became, since 2003, increasingly aware about widespread hunger among impoverished tribal and rural population in his state.
He and his colleagues Sachin Jain and Roli Shivhare are members of Madhya Pradesh support group of the Right to Food Campaign, which consists of a nationwide network of development workers and organizations engaged in grappling with issues of food, work, and livelihood.
In 2007, Dubey, Jain and Shivhare set up Vikas Samvaad, whose primary objective was to promote better understanding of developmental and social issues of Madhya Pradesh. They do so by filing 30-40 RTI applications in a month, collecting and analyzing a large amount of data, and feeding most relevant information to a network of journalists.
They also prepare ‘infopacks’, bundles of digestible information on various issues, for journalists and conduct training of journalists in using RTI Act 2005.
This strategic cultivation of the Media has come in handy for Dubey and his colleagues to highlight very successfully the issue of child malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh.
In May 2008, Dubey read a report in Dainik Jagran of death of five tribal children of an “unknown disease” in Hardua and Nakjheer villages of Uchehra block of Satna district. The report also said the chief medical officer of the district visited the villages only after being informed by the reporters, but would not name the disease that killed the children.
Another edition of Dainik Jagran published photographs of two children with swollen bellies and emaciated limbs; in the accompanying report, the reporter claimed that 150 children of Hardua and Nakjheer villages of Uchehra block were “completely malnourished.” The report also said that some of the local tribal people had never heard of anything called Anganvadi.
Over 18 and 19 May, a 5-member team of activists from the right to food campaign, including Dubey, and Madhya Pradesh Lok Sangharsh Saajha Manch visited Satna to find out the facts.
The team found that five under-3 children of the Puraina Panchayat in Uchehra block had died within three days. Two under-three children died over the next couple of days in two different Panchayats of the same block. Sixteen children of the same block were in critical condition.
That malnutrition was claiming lives of the children was evident in stark poverty and lack of development.
There was no pucca approach road to villages, no employment opportunity except collecting and selling firewood/tendu leaves and working in stone quarries, no education, no healthcare, and no easy access to drinking water.
One Aanganvadi had been opened five months ago for four villages of Puraina Panchayat with only 77 of the 102 children registered.
The Aanganvadi itself was a cruel joke --- no food for the last three months, no utensils, no drinking water, no toilet, no place to sit for children, no weighing machine, no measuring tape, no growth chart, no medicines, no soap and towel, no toys, and no learning aids.
The team also found that after the damning media reports the administration hurriedly sent 40 kg of foodgrains to the Aanganvadi. No child or adolescent girl or pregnant or lactating mother was being served cooked food as is prescribed by the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).
There was also blatant attempt by the administration to hide the grim situation of hunger and starvation.
The team weighed 52 children of Hardua and Nakjheer villages and found that 73 per cent of them were malnourished and 30 per cent were seriously malnourished.
The team reckoned that at least 12 children must have been dying every day in Satna district and 4597 every year.
The team made two more visits to Satna district in June and July 2008.
As the alarming facts tumbled out of Satna, Hindustan Times seized the issue. Based on the findings of May 18-19 visit of Dubey and his team, the headline of a June 12 report in Hindustan Times said: ‘Malnutrition claims 7 kids in Satna district’.
On August 13, Dubey filed an RTI application at Women and Child Development (WCD) department, Satna district, asking for the number of children dying due to malnutrition in the years 2006-07, 2007-08, and first seven months of 2008-09. He also asked for a copy of a departmental enquiry into child malnutrition deaths in Hardua and Nakjheer villages of Uchehra block and other relevant information.
Administration’s response was predictably in denial of the actual scale of the problem; some of the data shared with Dubey turned out to be wrong. The departmental enquiry however admitted that malnutrition might have been one of the reasons of death of children.
Dubey and his team then realized that the situation in other districts of the state could be alarming too.
He filed another RTI application in October 2008 at women and child department to seek village and block wise information on child malnutrition deaths in the entire state. He also asked for a copy of the departmental enquiry into malnutrition deaths that had lately been reported in Khandwa, Shivpuri and Sheopur districts, apart from Satna.
The response to that RTI was a washout. The department said it did not maintain any village and block wise information on child malnutrition deaths!
(That the government does not even maintain data on village and block wise child malnutrition deaths itself became a sensational report in some newspapers.)
By that time, it was reported that the state government had approved on a pilot basis the distribution of ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) in a block of Khandawa district even though it was yet an untried and untested food in India.
So Dubey filed another RTI application, seeking information on the process for approval of RUTF. He also sought information on children being treated at Nutrition Rehabilitation Centres (NRC), which state government had set up to treat severely malnourished children.
Information received with respect to both RUTF and NRC made more newspaper headlines. RUTF would be finally withdrawn;  it was shown that NRCs were not only way short of the number of severely malnourished children but were also understaffed and treating many more children than their capacities.
After hearing news that some Anganwadis had served a food powder that resembled horse-feed, Dubey filed another RTI application, enquiring how quality of food was assessed. He also sought to know the number of nutritionists appointed by the government.
Again, the response by the government – that samples of food were being sent for testing at labs in Delhi and Mumbai and no nutritionists post had been created – made news.
By September 2008 Madhya Pradesh high court, which had already been hearing a PIL on food security in the state, ordered the Chief Secretary to file a report on malnutrition deaths in four districts.
Huge amount of bad press that Madhya Pradesh government got made opposition Congress see an opportunity before the assembly elections in November 2008.
Before the elections Congress went full throttle with posters and a special ‘chargesheet’ on how Shivraj Singh Chaouhan government has shamed the entire state by neglecting the dying children.
The Congress also promised a comprehensive policy response to malnutrition in its manifesto for the assembly elections.
Uma Bharati’s Bhartiya Jan Shakti Party did the same.
Dubey and his colleagues also petitioned National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, which conducted a public hearing in the state and directed the government to start new Anganwadis.
Dubey also sent letters to the Madhya Pradesh advisor to the Commissioners appointed by the Supreme Court in the Right to Food Case, as well as MP Human Rights Commission, bringing more pressure to bear on the government.
Madhya Pradesh government has been forced to act.
It has hiked public expenditure on food for malnourished children from Rs 2.70 per child per day to Rs 6 per. For normal children, the expenditure has been doubled to Rs 4. For adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating mothers, expenditure has been hiked from Rs 2.30 to Rs 5.
State government has announced it will open 20,000 more Aanganvadis and is formulating a nutrition policy.
Dubey’s efforts also contributed to making child malnutrition a hot political and electoral issue. They made political parties to take stand on an issue that most of them conveniently sweep under the carpet.