A SURVEY has revealed that children in the B40 group are experiencing extreme levels of food and nutritional poverty and are at risk of becoming a “lost generation”.

The survey, which involved 332 households in Permatang Pauh, Penang, was carried out by Permatang Pauh MP Nurul Izzah Anwar with the help of Prof Fatimah Kari, a poverty expert and former Universiti Malaya economics professor.

Nurul Izzah said students in this group have also fallen significantly behind in their studies due to the lack of proper access to online learning, adding that they are in urgent need of internet access.

She said 23,910 students in Permatang Pauh are now forced to wait for the 12th Malaysia Plan’s fibre optic project, which is supposed to speed up internet connectivity.

“It is a costly investment and requires a long wait,” Nurul Izzah said in a statement, adding that RM3 billion was wasted on the fruitless Bestarinet programme.

“To date, thousands of schools are still waiting for a viable internet connection.

“Malaysia is currently experiencing the tragedy of severe child poverty post-Covid-19. This has tangible ripple effects on their education, social mobility and future prospects, so much so that they fare worse than their parents.”

She said the survey was conducted to accurately identify the deprivations faced by families on the ground so that targeted and more effective aid could be disbursed accordingly.

She said the findings have also concluded that it is necessary to provide an additional RM256 per capita to meet the nutritional needs of B40 children in Permatang Pauh.

Nurul Izzah suggested that the government fund more “grounded” mega projects by implementing more cost-effective and easy-to-implement technologies, an example would be TV White Space technology, which utilises the spectrum of unused or unassigned television channels.

“Unfortunately, in Malaysia, this technology is seen as a threat to local telecommunication companies looking to expand their cable and fibre networks,” she said.

“All we need now is for the government to approve the relevant regulation.”

Women-headed households suffering the most

Nurul Izzah also revealed that women-headed households and their children are significantly poorer than the male-headed families.

Even before Covid-19, she said, women have borne the brunt of structural inequalities and injustices that caused them to be more multi-dimensionally deprived.

She said Covid-19 exacerbated these inequalities, making women more vulnerable than ever in the aspects of finance, health and social mobility.

“This is the heart-breaking reality experienced now by our ‘Keluarga Malaysia’, our Malaysian families on the ground,” she said.

To further safeguard generations under the care of such households, Nurul Izah urged the government to emulate the shariah court family support division’s initiative, which provides divorced mothers an advance on their alimony in the event their husband fails to uphold this responsibility, leaving their families high and dry.

“The 12th Malaysia Plan must specifically provide an ecosystem that focuses on the needs of gender; ‘from cradle to grave; from victim to abuser’,” she said.

Nurul Izzah said a holistic approach to protecting women should include supporting efforts to reform the Prisons Department through the formation of a sentencing council.  

Lack of aid given to needy families

The survey also revealed that aid for needy children (Bantuan Kanak-Kanak) under the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development was only delivered to 62,000 families last year, which is less than 1% of all Malaysian households.

As for aid for senior citizens (Bantuan Warga Emas), also under the same ministry, only RM600 million was delivered to less than 4% of Malaysians aged 60 and above.

Nurul Izzah said the reason why these figures are low is because narrow conditions for eligibility are used to gate-keep distribution of aid, despite Malaysia’s Poverty Line Income (PLI) increasing from RM980 to RM2,208 in 2019.

“However, aid disbursement in 2020 still utilised the older PLI. It is absolutely certain that many individuals in need have been left out as they are categorised as ineligible,” she said.

By 2020, she said the total number of social and subsidy programmes launched increased from only 95 in 2012 to 137.

However, she said the total expenditure for these programmes fell from 3.46% of the gross domestic product (45.5 billion) in 2012 to only 1.81% of the GDP (25.5 billion) in 2020.

“Who are we really protecting here? Our existing taxation policies are mostly regressive, therefore the government needs to introduce new progressive taxation to finance our nation’s social programmes,” she said.

“In the most grounded sense, we must do our best to protect our Malaysian families (Keluarga Malaysia).” –October 6, 2021.