IT IS a sad reflection on the mentality of the Indian bureaucracy that it believes that paperwork and approvals, which usually result in needless delays, are of a greater concern than a child's life.

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare pulled up Unicef for supplying Ready to Eat Therapeutic Food (RUTF) to severely malnourished children in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh without first obtaining the government's permission. Without the life-saving food, undoubtedly, a large number of children would have succumbed to various infections. The victims, who suffered from the medical condition known as Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), were from Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. The Bihar children were uprooted from their homes because of the Kosi floods, the emaciated Madhya Pradesh victims were tribals who had low weight and suffered from diarrhea.

The ministry, far from showing any appreciation for Unicef's humanitarian act, took strong exception to the international body's intervention and threw the rulebook at it.

It even demanded that Unicef restore to the country the $2.4 million spent on the supply of the RUTF although it is debatable whether the international body needs to obtain clearance from the government for each one of its programmes in India.

More than 50 years after Independence, our bureaucrats have a nitpicking mindset, which allows minor regulations to cloud the larger picture. The attitude of the media and some NGOs towards Unicef's initiative, too, was an eye opener.

A section of the media lapped up the leaks from the ministry to make out that a reputed international body was guilty of some sort of fraud.

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