Starving Indian Kids Denied Free Eggs Over Religio

CBSNews ^ | July 9, 2015

[Steelfish]

July 9, 2015 Starving Indian Kids Denied Free Eggs Over Religion

MADKHEDA, India -- Clutching battered metal plates, the children waited patiently in a remote central Indian village for the two small flat pieces of bread and scoop of boiled potato curry that would be their only full meal that day.

They are among the 120 million malnourished children across India who depend on a government-run program serving lunch five days a week.

Still, the modest menus are clearly not enough to make up for the calories and nutrition that poverty has denied. All 35 or so children gathered on the dirt floor of their preschool in Madkheda, a village in the state of Madhya Pradesh, show the telltale signs of malnutrition - coarse hair lightened to a sandy brown for lack of nutrients, limbs stick thin, and bellies swollen from chronic hunger.

More than half the children in Madhya Pradesh state, with a population of nearly 77 million, are underweight and malnourished.

So last month, it was suggested that eggs - a key source of protein - be added to the lunch program. But that idea was rejected by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the state's top elected official, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and a strict vegetarian. He suggested that milk and bananas be given to children instead.

"As long I am the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, eggs will not be introduced," Chouhan declared in the state capital, Bhopal. "The human body is meant to consume vegetarian food, which has everything the human body requires."

[SgtHooper]

So now I hafta send my scraps to India, instead of China!?

[DH]

WoW! They just keep spitting out babies like wet watermelon seeds.

How could they ever have expected to reach this point in their population? Could it possibly be by the fact that they are supported by the government?

[null and void]

Ah! So Singh isn’t a certain marker for Sikh! Thanks!

[Mrs. Don-o]

It's a fact of life everywhere, that poor people have to follow powerful people's norms. And not just the poor: all of us have to follow other's norms every day of our lives. Sometimes we take it in stride. Sometimes it's irksome.

But here it borders on a life-and-death issue. These kids already have signs of protein-deficient morbidity: stunted growth, discolored hair (symptom of kwashiorkor), lack of disease resistance, thus at risk not of death from starvation per se, but of whatever the endemic diseases are --- tuberculosis, cholera, other infectious diseases--- that cut down malnourished kids.

FTA, the eggs are available and the kids and their parents have no objection to them. Give them the eggs. People have revolutions over less than this.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I’d assume Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is a Hindu. He’s a top political operative of the BJP, an aggressively Hindus-only political party.

[Lazamataz]

I had a friend at my place of work who was a vegetarian.

I forced him at gunpoint to eat a steak.

I had a friend at my place of work.