Transforming Nutrition in India: Poshan Abhiyan

Background

POSHAN Abhiyaan is an overarching umbrella scheme to improve the nutritional outcomes for children, pregnant women and lactating mothers by holistically addressing the multiple determinants of malnutrition and attempts to prioritize the efforts of all stakeholders on a comprehensive package of intervention and services targeted on the first 1000 days of a child’s life. It seeks to do so through an appropriate governance structure by leveraging and intensifying the implementation of existing programs across multiple Ministries while at the same time trying to rope in the expertise and energies of a whole range of other stakeholders – State Governments, Communities, Think tanks, Philanthropic Foundations and other Civil Society Actors. It aims to reduce child stunting, underweight and low birth weight by 2 percentage points per annum and anaemia among children (and young females) by 3 percentage points per annum. It is based on 4 pillars:

1. Ensuring access to quality services across the continuum of care to every woman and child; particularly during the first 1000 days of the child’s life.
2. Ensuring convergence of multiple programs and schemes: ICDS, PMMVY, NHM (with its sub components such as JSY, MCP card, Anaemia Mukt Bharat, RBSK, IDCF, HBNC, HBYC, Take Home Rations), Swachh Bharat Mission, National Drinking water Mission, NRLM etc.
3. Leveraging technology (ICDS-CAS) to empower the frontline worker with near real time information to ensure prompt and preventive action; rather than reactive one.
4. Jan Andolan: Engaging the community in this Mission to ensure that it transcends the contours of being a mere Government programme into a peoples’ movement inducing large scale behaviour change with the ownership of the efforts being vested in the community rather than government delivery mechanisms