India’s high rates of stunting, wasting, and anaemia continue to pose serious public health hazards for children and women. To address these difficulties, India must strengthen its social sector programmes, particularly the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).
What exactly is ICDS?
- The ICDS programme is a major programme of the Indian government that addresses the nutritional and developmental requirements of children under the age of six, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers. The programme is carried out through Anganwadi centres, which act as grassroots delivery hubs for various services in rural and urban areas throughout the country.
The following are the main components of ICDS Supplementary Nutrition:
- Children under the age of six, pregnant women, and breastfeeding moms are all eligible for ICDS. To combat hunger and promote healthy growth, this involves providing hot cooked meals, take-home rations, and nutritional supplements.
- Immunisation: The programme guarantees that children are immunised against preventable diseases on time. It helps families realise the need of vaccination and promotes immunisation sessions.
- Health Examinations: Children and women receive regular health check-ups to track their growth, diagnose any health abnormalities, and give relevant medical interventions. Weight monitoring, growth evaluation, and screening for common diseases are all part of this.
- Referral Services: When necessary, ICDS refers children and women to competent healthcare facilities for specialised care and treatment. It serves as a bridge between the community and the healthcare system, ensuring that important services are delivered on time.
- Non-formal Pre-school Education: ICDS centres offer early childhood education to children ages three to six. To prepare children for formal schooling, this includes age-appropriate learning activities, cognitive stimulation, and socialisation chances.
- Nutrition and Health Education: Through education and awareness initiatives, the programme emphasises the importance of nutrition and health. Anganwadi personnel teach families on correct nutrition, cleanliness practises, breastfeeding, and mother and child health on a regular basis.
- Community Mobilisation: The ICDS programme fosters community participation and engagement. It aims to engage families, community leaders, and local organisations in raising awareness, advocating for children’s rights, and assisting with the effective implementation of ICDS programmes.
- Anganwadi Workers: As the ICDS’s frontline functionaries, anganwadi workers play a key role in delivering services at the grassroots level. They are in charge of making house visits, carrying out programme activities, counselling families, and keeping records.
The Impact of ICDS on Cognitive Achievements:
- According to a study published in World Development, ICDS has a positive impact on cognitive achievements, especially among females and economically disadvantaged families. The program’s initiatives, which include nutrition, education, and health care, have been demonstrated to boost children’s cognitive development.
- Educational Attainment: According to another study published in The University of Chicago Press Journals, children who were exposed to ICDS throughout their first three years of life completed more grades than those who did not. This suggests that the early interventions offered by ICDS have a positive impact on educational attainment.
- School Enrollment: According to a research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adolescents aged 13 to 18 born in villages with proper ICDS implementation had a 7.8% higher likelihood of enrolling in school. This implies that ICDS plays a role in boosting access to schooling and enrolment rates.
- Malnutrition Reduction: Children who remained enrolled in ICDS had lower rates of stunting and severe malnutrition. ICDS helps to improve nutritional outcomes and treat malnutrition issues by giving supplemental nutrition and monitoring children’s growth.
Why is it necessary to reevaluate existing strategies?
- Addressing Persistent Issues: The ICDS programme continues to experience difficulties in improving nutritional and health outcomes for children aged 0-6 years. Despite four decades of effort, there is an urgent need to rethink tactics for efficiently addressing these chronic difficulties.
- Anganwadi Workers’ Empowerment: It is critical to empower Anganwadi staff, who are in the forefront of implementing the ICDS programme. These employees are critical to the advancement of child nutrition, health, and education in their communities. However, they frequently confront difficulties as a result of a heavy workload and inadequate resources.
- Implementation variance: There is a huge variance in the implementation of ICDS across different regions and the degree of competence of Anganwadi staff. This necessitates further investments in training programmes to ensure standardised, high-quality service delivery.
- Improvements to Infrastructure: The ICDS programme confronts infrastructure problems as well, such as a lack of functional sanitation facilities, access to potable water, and suitable physical infrastructure in many Anganwadi centres. It is critical to address these infrastructure deficiencies in order to improve service delivery and overall programme performance.
The Benefits of Adding More Workers to the ICDS Programme
- Improvements in Health and Education: Adding an extra Anganwadi staff to each centre can improve children’s health and education outcomes. Increased staff levels within the ICDS framework resulted in increased maths and language test scores among enrolled children, according to a randomised controlled experiment conducted in Tamil Nadu. The extra employee effectively quadrupled the net preschool instructional time, resulting in significant positive outcomes.
- Reduced Rates of Stunting and Severe Malnutrition: The same trial in Tamil Nadu found that children who stayed in the programme had lower rates of stunting and severe malnutrition. The presence of additional employees can help to increase nutritional support and monitoring, resulting in better child health outcomes.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Implementing the strategy of adding an additional Anganwadi worker to each centre across the country is very inexpensive in comparison to the potential advantages. Based on predicted increases in lifetime wages, the estimated long-term benefits would be 13 to 21 times the expenses.
- Role Specialisation: With an extra worker, responsibilities can be separated, allowing existing staff to focus more on child health and nutrition. The new Anganwadi worker can be given the job of focusing on preschool and early childhood education. This specialisation enables more efficient use of resources and knowledge, leading in better outcomes in both the health and education areas.
- Women’s Empowerment and Job Opportunities: Adding an extra Anganwadi worker to each centre generates job opportunities across the country, particularly for women. This initiative would result in the development of 1.3 million new jobs for women, so promoting economic empowerment and gender equality.
ICDS Programme Implementation Difficulties
- Implementation diversity: There is significant diversity in the implementation of the ICDS programme across India’s various regions. This difference can be linked to variables including as resource allocation, infrastructural availability, and Anganwadi worker capacity. It is critical for the program’s effectiveness to address this variation and ensure standardised implementation throughout all regions.
- Anganwadi Worker Skill Levels: Anganwadi personnel have a wide range of skill levels. To maintain continuous and high-quality service delivery, it is vital to invest in training programmes that improve these workers’ skills and expertise.
- Many Anganwadi centres suffer infrastructural issues, such as a lack of effective sanitation facilities, limited access to drinkable water, and inadequate physical infrastructure. These infrastructure deficiencies impede the effective implementation of ICDS services.
- Decentralised Implementation: The ICDS programme is implemented decentralised, with state governments directing the program’s implementation, administration, management, and monitoring. While decentralisation encourages personalised implementation, it also introduces new issues in terms of coordination, resource allocation, and maintaining comparable standards across states and regions.
Way Forward
- Empowering Anganwadi workers requires comprehensive support, training programs, and capacity-building programs. Increasing staffing levels and focusing on preschool and early childhood education can alleviate workload and improve outcomes.
- Improve Anganwadi centers’ infrastructure by providing sanitation facilities, clean drinking water, and adequate buildings. Strengthen monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to assess program progress, impact, and effectiveness, identifying gaps and inform evidence-based decision-making for improvement.
- Collaborative approach: Central and state governments, local communities, and effective coordination are crucial for ICDS program implementation. Sustainable funding, prioritizing child nutrition and early childhood development, and partnerships with non-governmental organizations can mobilize resources.
- Community engagement and awareness are crucial for ICDS program success. Mobilization efforts, campaigns, workshops, and interactive sessions should be conducted to engage families and encourage active participation. Regular policy reviews should adapt to changing needs and evidence, incorporating best practices and aligning with national and international standards.
@the end
Revisit ICDS strategies and implementation to address child malnutrition, empower Anganwadi workers, and improve infrastructure, enabling significant progress in nutrition, health, and educational outcomes in India.
Source: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/strengthening-the-icds-scheme/article66968361.ece