Poshan Abhiyaan

Dr Puneet Bhat
POSHAN ( Prime Minister’s overarching Scheme for Holistic Nourishment) Abhiyaan,the flagship programme of the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD), Government of India was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan with much fanfare on the occasion of the International Women’s Day on March 8, 2018.POSHAN Abhiyaan has been set up with a three year budget of Rs.9046.17 crore commencing from 2017-18. This will be funded by Government Budgetary Support (50%) and 50% by IBRD . India ranks 10th in terms of prevalence of underweight children in the world and 17th in terms of prevalence of stunting, according to UNICEF. United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (2.2) promises to end all forms of malnutrition by 2025, which includes control over stunting & wasting in children less than 5 years of age and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women.The goals of Poshan Abhiyaan are to achieve improvement in nutritional status of Children from 0-6 years, Adolescent Girls, Pregnant Women and Lactating Mothers in a time bound manner during the next three years beginning 2017-18.. Poshan Abhiyaan targets to reduce stunting, under- nutrition, anaemia (among young children, women and adolescent girls) and reduce low birth weight by 2%, 2%, 3% and 2% per annum respectively.A key idea of the initiative is to incentivise Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) for using ICT-based tools, making it easier to implement and monitor the programme. The intention is to do this through convergence, mass movements and leveraging technology. Anganwadi workers (AWWs) are required to feed in details of the beneficiaries and monitor their growth in real time during pregnancy, as well as height and weight of the child once born, in the mobile phones given to them and follow up with SMS alerts to those who are at risk. However, certain fundamental issues need fixing for the programme to be successfully implemented.
Anganwadi centres (AWCs) have always been a first point of contact between the community which involves pregnant women, lactating mothers and children for nutritional and health services.Though the ICDS programme has evolved much after it was started long back in 1975 but still many of the AWCs lack basic amenities and face infrastructure issues. . The lack of proper space for playing and absence of clean drinking water adds to the problem. According to the Rapid Survey on Children (2013-14) carried out by the Union ministry of women and child development, 74% of AWCs had functional baby-weighing scales and 23% of them had adult-weighing scales. The evaluation which was carried out by NITI Aayog in 2015 had found that over 24% of the AWCs surveyed maintained poor records.
To overcome the challenges of the tedious system of manually maintaining daily registers and monitor growth efficiently, ICT-enabled real time monitoring has been rolled out in POSHAN Abhiyaan . This will help to find the severely malnourshied children in the district. However due to the limited capacities of AWWs to handle smartphones owing to their lack of technological literacy is a big challenge which we have to overcome . Another issue is the frontline workers such as AWWs face innumerable local challenges like lack of training, poor infrastructure, irregular supply of supplementary nutrition and poor supervision. An AWW is entrusted with many non-ICDS tasks – such as preparing voter IDs, conducting census, employment or Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission) surveys and helming election booths – none of which is paid work except for election duty. The strategy of actively involving otherwise unsupportive panchayat leaders in construction of AWCs and improvement in the quality of village health sanitation and nutrition, will make POSHAN Abhiyaan more effective . We have to also ensure the supply of IFA tablets and supplementary nutrition needs to be regular.Public distribution system should adopt Food Fortification to address hidden hunger or micro-nutrient deficiencies.Lastly, the mission’s focus is to transform into a people’s movement, a Jan Andolan, to bring about change in the people themselves, in their behaviour. The mission is bringing the power of Janbhagidari, people’s participation, into making India’s children well-nourished and healthy.
India represents at least one third of the world’s burden of malnutrition; therefore, as a global community, we will not be able to keep our Sustainable Development Goal promise of eliminating all forms of malnutrition by 2030 unless we accelerate progress in India. One cannot build a strong building on a weak foundation. Today’s children are the future of tomorrow, and so it’s important they have access to nutritious food right from birth through adolescence. We need to set the basics right in order to make POSHAN Abhiyaan a success.
(The author is currently working as Swasth Bharat Prerak , Tata Trust and an alumnus of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai)
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