More children, young mothers flock Anganwadi Centres
   Date :09-Oct-2020

Anganwadi Centres_1 
 
Principal Correspondent :
 
30% increase in footfall since 2017 especially from Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, Palghar districts, thanks to Tata Trusts’ initiative
 
 
Despite Government’s efforts for bringing children and mothers to anganwadis, the response was bleak. Now, Tata Trusts, known for its philanthropic works has set out with a goal to demonstrate sustainable improvement in the nutritional status of population with a focus on reducing stunting and anaemia. It worked as more children and young mothers started coming to angadwadi centres. About 30% rise has been noticed especially in Palghar, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli districts. In 1975, the Government of India launched the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) to improve the health and nutrition of children.
 
As part of ICDS, Anganwadi Centres began to work with women supporting women's groups at the village level by providing child care activities. The objective was to provide early childhood care to young children in the age group of 1 to 5, and to remove the burden of childcare from mothers and elder siblings. The most important aim of Anganwadi Centres today is to prepare children aged 1-5 for entry into primary school, to improve their health by providing nutrition-rich food, and to increase school attendance, by both inculcating the habit of going daily to an educational institution, and ensuring that older siblings do not stay at home in order to take care of children. ICDS is one of the biggest platforms in the world for tackling malnutrition. Owing to this, India has seen an improvement in the overall malnutrition status of children under the age of five.
 
A total of 13.3 per cent fall in cases of stunting (low height for age) was recorded in 2018, with 34.7 per cent children stunted as compared to 48 per cent in 2005-06. The country also witnessed a decrease of almost 10 per cent in the cases of underweight children, with 33.4 per cent children recorded as underweight in 2018. Over the past two decades, India has slowly made significant progress in advancing its nutrition indicators. Still, much more needs to be done. In 2017, Tata Trusts set out with the goal to demonstrate sustainable improvement in the nutritional status of the population with a special focus on reducing stunting and anaemia. To achieve this, it was important to improve the quality and coverage of services in ICDS and National Health Mission (NHM), with a special focus on training, demand generation and monitoring management information system among others. In order to catapult development and effect change, helping hands are crucial.
 
Thus, the programme adopted a multi-pronged approach for execution, and identified Palghar, Chandrapur and Gadchirolli districts of Maharashtra, for a pilot, covering 4,114 Anganwadi Centres and 4.45 lakh children under 6 years, and 16 lakh women of reproductive age. The programme focused on system strengthening: upgrading over 3200 Anganwadi Centres and refurbishing over 100, capacity building of frontline workers; community mobilization initiatives, convergence of Anganwadi Workers-ASHAs-ANMs, and tracking of high-risk cases of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) children; and convergence within ICDS and NHM as well as ICDS and Panchayati Raj Institution at the village level until the lockdown. The programme formed Whatsapp groups of beneficiaries and Anganwadi workers, using smartphones as granted under the POSHAN abhiyaan scheme, which helped in resumption of all possible activities on ground, virtually.
 
So far, through 467 Whatsapp Groups, the programme has trained 5137 Anganwadi, ASHA and ANM workers. With the support of frontline workers, the programme was able to counsel and provide support to 2834 pregnant and lactating women. By virtually monitoring and supporting 573 village health sanitation and nutrition days, the programme has been able to track and follow up with 440 high risk pregnant mothers and 361 high risk young children, and 355 SAM children, who are being provided with nutritious food from Maharashtra government.