Telangana region: Fifty per cent of India's children are already malnourished and drought is making the worse long-term impact on an entire generation of children. A direct fallout of rural distress and price rise is being seen on the nutritional food intake of growing children.
Revathi and Naresh look forward to their evening meal because it is the best meal of the day when their mother cooks a vegetable. Earlier, meat every Sunday used to be a treat, but now forgotten.
The family of five gets 20 kg of subsidised rice at Rs 2 a kg. So, the challenge for their mother is to make it last as long as possible.
"Earlier, I would buy one kg of vegetable. Now we make do with half a kg or less. The rice we get in the ration shop is never enough. I have to buy from outside. Because of drought, bringing up children, repaying debts, farmers like us are really struggling," said Pochamma, their farmer-mother.
"There is a lot of difference in what we used to eat before and what we eat now. Even at school, they have stopped giving egg in the midday meal," said Raju, Pochamma's elder son.
Not just has the egg gone missing from the mid-day meal at many schools, the dal has become more watery than ever. So, many children are in fact missing school to find work at NREGA sites, so they can at least eat better.
In their home, the children are too young to comprehend that their doting 'daddy' is gone forever. He drank pesticide after crops failed. The psychological scars no less traumatic than the physical deprivation.