POSHAN Abhiyan

The Centre has instructed state governments and their Women and Child Development (WCD) departments to ensure digitisation of anganwadi services. This is to ensure that migrating families can continue accessing the government’s Take Home Ration scheme even if they move to other states.

Key highlights –

• Focus on migrant families — Migrating families often fall through the cracks and stop receiving benefits of anganwadi services when they relocate from one state to another, or even between blocks and districts within a state.
• Digitisation of the process —
  • • The government is now pushing for complete digitisation of the process so that registration of beneficiaries of one state can be accessed in any other.
    • The WCD ministry has proposed that the Anganwadi services should be digitised through the Poshan tracker.
    • Even if a family moves, women, and especially children, can continue to get supplementary nutrition given by the government to curb malnutrition.
• Help in battling alarming levels of malnutrition —
  • • According to the NFHS-5, 35.5 percent of children below five years were stunted and 32.1 percent were underweight in 2019-21.
    • By connecting the beneficiaries through its digital malnutrition measuring tool, Poshan tracker, the government is planning to address the issue of malnutrition.

What is ‘Take Home Ration’?

• As part of the Centre’s flagship Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Take Home Ration (THR) is provided to —
  • • children between 6 months and 3 years,
    • pregnant women and lactating mothers, as well as adolescent girls.
• Freshly cooked hot food and a morning snack is provided to children between 3 and 6 years, who attend anganwadi centres daily, for 300 days annually.

What is ‘Poshan Tracker’?

• Digital infrastructure under the “Poshan Tracker” was rolled out by Ministry of Women and Child Development on 1st March 2021 through National e-Governance Division as a governance tool.
• It records real-time data on malnourished and ‘severe acute malnourished’ children in each anganwadi.
• It will strengthen and bring about transparency in nutrition delivery support systems.
• Technology under Poshan Tracker is being leveraged for —
  • • dynamic identification of stunting, wasting, under-weight prevalence among children;
    • last mile tracking of nutrition service delivery.

About POSHAN Abhiyaan –

• Launched in 2018, the focus of Abhiyaan is to lay emphasis on nutritional status of adolescent girls, pregnant women, lactating mothers and children from 0-6 years age.
• It strives to reduce the level of stunning, under-nutrition, Anaemia and low birth weight in children.
• The objective of POSHAN Abhiyaan is to reduce stunting across districts with the highest malnutrition burden by improving utilisation of key anganwadi services and improving the quality of anganwadi services delivery.
• The National Nutrition Mission (NNM), also known as the POSHAN Abhiyan, aims to reduce stunting, underweight and low birth weight each by 2 per cent per annum; and anaemia among children, adolescent girls and women, each by 3 per cent per annum by 2022.
• POSHAN 2.0 —
  • • Launched in February 2022, it is an Integrated Nutrition Support Programme.
    • Poshan 2.0 shall focus on Maternal Nutrition, Infant and Young Child Feeding Norms, Treatment of MAM/SAM (Moderate/ Severe Acute Malnutrition) and Wellness through AYUSH. It will rest on the pillars of Convergence, Governance, and Capacity-building.
    • Poshan Abhiyan will be the key pillar for Outreach and will cover innovations related to nutritional support, ICT interventions, Media Advocacy and Research, Community Outreach and Jan Andolan.