PM Modi wants mission mode on Poshan Abhiyaan
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed States and Union Territories to work in a mission mode and do regular monitoring to give a boost to Poshan Abhiyaan.
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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed States and Union Territories to work in a mission mode and do regular monitoring to give a boost to Poshan Abhiyaan. The programme is aimed at providing adequate nutrition to children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating mothers by leveraging technology and adopting a targeted approach and convergence.
In a recent meeting with the Chief Secretaries of States and UTs and Secretaries of the Ministries and Departments concerned through video conference, the Prime Minister asked them to adopt a whole of government approach, official sources told Bizz Buzz.
Modi also emphasized that a mass movement is needed for the successful implementation of Poshan Abhiyaan, which he had launched on the occasion of the International Women's Day on March 8, 2018, at Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan.
The Abhiyaan provides a platform to converge the activities of various stakeholders towards attaining the goal of 'Suposhit Bharat.' Under the Abhiyaan, the high impact interventions of 18 Ministries and Departments have been mapped out, especially during the first 1,000 days of child-life since conception. Each converging Ministry and Department prepares an action plan related to nutrition and integrates it with its ongoing activities, according to a government website.
The NITI Aayog has played a critical role in shaping the Abhiyaan. The National Nutrition Strategy (NNS), released by the Aayog in September 2017, presented a microanalysis of the problems persisting in the nutrition domain and chalked out an in-depth strategy for course correction. Most of the recommendations presented in the strategy document were subsumed within the design of Abhiyaan.
The prominent features of Poshan Abhiyaan are:
l A high impact package of interventions with a focus on (but not limited to) the first 1,000 days of a child's life;
l Strengthening delivery of this high impact package of interventions through remodeling of nutrition monitoring through the introduction of Integrated Child Development Services - Common Application Software or ICDSCAS, which leverages technology for management as well as monitoring;
l Improving capacities of frontline workers through the incremental learning approach (ILA) mechanism;
l Emphasizing convergent actions among the frontline workforce, including through performance-linked joint incentives for the 3As (ASHA, Anganwadi and ANM);
l A focus on cross-sectoral convergence to emphasize the multi-dimensional nature of malnutrition, mapping of various schemes contributing towards addressing malnutrition;
l Convergence committees at the state, district and block levels will supporting decentralized and convergent planning and implementation, supported by flexipool and innovation funds to encourage contextualized solutions;
l Ramping up behaviour change communication and community mobilization through Jan Andolan, a large-scale national nutrition behavior change campaign that uses community-based events, mass media and other approaches.
