INDIA: More than 9,000 children under the age of six have died, mostly from malnutrition, in tribal areas of India's western Maharashtra state in the past year.
According to official statistics, an average of 500 infants died each month in 15 districts of the prosperous province whose capital, Mumbai (Bombay), is the country's richest city and where Bollywood, the world's most prolific film-making industry, is located.
Tens of thousands of Indians flock annually to Mumbai in pursuit of the chimerical "gold" that supposedly paves its streets.
The deaths become even more alarming as the tribal population of children under the age of six in the state has dwindled to around 800,000, officials said.
The state's senior health official, however, denied that all the deaths were related to malnutrition, even though it is widely acknowledged that the tribal areas are among India's poorest and the most backward and neglected.
"There are a variety of factors, including low birth weight, jaundice, convulsions, hypothermia and premature delivery," the state's health services chief, Dr Subhash Salunke, said.
Dr Salunke played down the shocking statistics by declaring that the number of infants who had died formed less than 2 per cent of the tribal child population. The government, he added, was tackling the "socio-economic component" of the problem by treating adolescent anaemia and other medically related factors.
According to UNICEF, about 2.3 million children under the age of five die annually in India, around half of them from malnutrition. Consequently, the soaring fatality rate of Maharashtra's tribal children over the past year is roughly 17 times the national average.
Dr Amar Jessani said the state government's reluctance to accept malnutrition as the principal reason for these deaths was understandable. Admitting as much would make it a massive political issue for the opposition, led by the fundamentalist Hindu Shiv Sena party, to exploit ahead of state assembly elections later this year.
The Chief Minister, Mr Sushil Kumar Shinde, dismissed the reports of malnutrition deaths as "exaggerated", claiming the fatalities were due to illnesses like fevers, hypothermia and snake bites.
The health department, meanwhile, has deployed 130 mobile clinics and dispatched 20 ambulances to the affected tribal areas to try and control the situation. But Dr Salunke conceded that it would take another five years to reduce the state's infant mortality by 25 per cent.
Over the past week headlines in leading Indian newspapers have highlighted Maharashtra's child deaths, providing chilling details of the absence of hospital facilities, medical dispensaries or even the remotest attempt by the state to offer the deprived tribal population any succour.
One leading daily detailed the horrifying account of an old woman carrying her one-year-old orphaned granddaughter 40km to a local hospital only to find it had no doctor. The infant died soon after.
A large number of rural hospitals, especially in tribal belts, are insufficiently equipped and in some instances exist only on paper.
Malnutrition in any part of India is shocking for, unlike the situation in the early years after independence in 1947, the country no longer faces a food shortage, having become a net exporter of grain.
But widespread corruption has led to the breakdown of the public distribution system while maltreatment of the tribal population, ignorant of their rights, has further exacerbated their plight.