Bihar launched the action plan to fight malnutrition

After the major death rates of children due to AES, the government is now concerned about the malnutrition rate in children. An action plan has been launched by the State Social Welfare Department on 28th June 2019 for Poshan Abhiyan Scheme. A workshop was held to launch this scheme where the action plan was discussed focussing on nutrition enhancement and reducing malnutrition in children. The workshop had 16 departments of the state government, civil society and mass media.

” Poshan Abhiyan is India’s flagship programme to improve nutritional outcomes for children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating mothers by leveraging technology, a target approach and convergence.”

Features-

1.The POSHAN Abhiyaan, as an apex body, will monitor, supervise, fix targets and guide the nutrition-related interventions across the Ministries.

2.The proposal consists of mapping of various Schemes contributing towards addressing malnutrition, introducing a very robust convergence mechanism

3 ICT based Real Time Monitoring system

4. Incentivizing States/UTs for meeting the targets

5. incentivizing Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) for using IT-based tools

6.Eliminating registers used by AWWs

7. Introducing the measurement of the height of children at the Anganwadi Centres (AWCs)

8. Social Audits

9. Setting-up Nutrition Resource Centres, involving masses through Jan Andolan for their participation in nutrition through various activities, among others.

Scheme-

1.POSHAN Abhiyaan was launched by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan in March 2018.

It targets to reduce the level of under-nutrition and other related problems by ensuring the convergence of various nutrition-related schemes.

2. It also targets stunting, under-nutrition, anaemia (among young children, women and adolescent girls) and low birth rate.

3. It will monitor and review the implementation of all such schemes and utilize existing structural arrangements of line ministries wherever available.

4. Its large component involves gradual scaling-up of interventions supported by on-going World Bank assisted Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Systems Strengthening and Nutrition Improvement Project (ISSNIP) to all districts in the country by 2022.

MAJOR IMPACT-

The programme through the targets will strive to reduce the level of stunting, under-nutrition, anaemia and low birth weight babies. It will create synergy, ensure better monitoring, issue alerts for timely action, and encourage States/UTs to perform, guide and supervise the line Ministries and States/UTs to achieve the targeted goals.

This Action plan has been launched with support from UNICEF. With an aim to make India malnutrition free by 2022, Poshan Abhiyan was already launched by PM Narendra Modi on 8th March 2019. The first state to develop its own action plan is Bihar to fight the malnutrition in children. The current status of death by AES and malnutrition being the major reason of this disease outbreak in Bihar is the major reason to start this action plan soon.

A wing of the Social Welfare Department, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) will be the responsible agency for Poshan Abhiyan Drive in the state. In the workshop, Alok Kumar stated, Convergence of different departments was required to fight malnutrition.

UNICEF gave a report that 13% of malnourished children in India are from Bihar and this is a major concern.

After seeing the worsened condition of children due to lack of nutrition and food, we hope that this Poshan Abhiyan Scheme improves the condition and the status of malnourished children in the state declines in coming days.

SOURCE- TOI

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