BJP slams Cong 'falsehood' on child malnutrition issue

Ravi Shankar Prasad says the malnutrition rate has come down from 74% to 25% in Gujarat

A day after the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat countered the CAG's opinion about the child malnutrition rate in the state, BJP today hit at Congress for allegedly indulging in "falsehood" over the issue.

Senior party leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the malnutrition rate has come down from 74 per cent to 25 per cent at present in Gujarat, an "exemplary" record when compared with the situation in Congress-ruled states.

"Gujarat's record is exemplary, outstanding, inclusive and the so called equity conscious government of (Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh and (Congress President) Sonia Gandhi, the record of Congress governments (in the states) is distressing and totally unsatisfactory," he told reporters here.

To buttress his point, Prasad cited the malnutrition rate in BJP-ruled states and said that the reduction rate in the Congress-ruled ones were "negligible" in comparison.

In case of Madhya Pradesh, he said the malnutrition rate had come down from 49 per cent in 2006-07 to only 27 per cent in 2012-13.

Likewise, in Chhattisgarh it had come down from 42 per cent to less than 37 per cent.

"But all the Congress governments, except Maharashtra, have shown very negligible growth rate," he said referring to the CAG report of 2012-13.

In Congress-ruled Andhra Pradesh, the malnutrition rate had come down by only 5 per cent, from 53 per cent in 2006-07 to only 48 per cent in 2012-13, whereas in Haryana, the slide was from 45 to 42 per cent.

Making a mention of the Delhi government as well, he said that the malnutrition rate here had come down from 54.28 per cent to about 49.87 per cent.

"These statistics speak for themselves, my friends from Congress should stop indulging in falsehood," he said.

The Modi government had yesterday countered the CAG's opinion that 66 per cent of the children in the state are underweight, claiming that the rate had declined to less than 26 per cent in 2013 due to various steps taken by it.

"As a result of various nutrition interventions undertaken by Gujarat government, the percentage of underweight children decreased from 73.04 per cent in March, 2007, to 25.09 per cent in March, 2013," officials from the state government had said in a statement.