E-Paper
Underweight kids: 12 districts show positive improvement over 5 years
The top 12 districts which are doing well include Sangli, Osmanabad, Pune, Raigad, Buldhana, Nagpur, Kolhapur, Solapur, Akola, Mumbai city, Latur and Washim. These districts showed a decline in the prevalence of underweight children under 5-years of age between 2015-16 and 2019-20
PUNE Niti Aayog has congratulated the state government’s Integrated Child Development Scheme, as 12 of 36 districts in the state have shown a positive improvement in the number of underweight children in the past five years.
These districts showed a decline in the prevalence of underweight children under 5-years of age between 2015-16 and 2019-20.
Osmanabad, chosen as the aspirational district, led the way with a 12% decline.
The percentage of underweight children went down from 44.5% to 32.5% across all districts in Maharashtra.
Rubal Agarwal, commissioner, Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) said, “Osmanabad was one of the aspirational districts and due to our extra efforts on the same, as per the rules laid down by the central government for the aspirational district, we focused on that one district and took multiple steps like recruitment of staff, monitoring, nutritional schemes and now eventually, the district has given us some positive results. We are also working on bringing down the number of underweight kids in other districts as well.”
As per the report prepared by ICDS as of June 2020, the top 12 districts which are doing well include Sangli, Osmanabad, Pune, Raigad, Buldhana, Nagpur, Kolhapur, Solapur, Akola, Mumbai city, Latur and Washim, while the districts that reported the highest number of underweight children are Nandurbar, Palghar, Yavatmal, Gondia, Gadchiroli, Nanded, Parbhani, Amravati, Mumbai suburban and Wardha.
The state average is 16.34% of underweight children and 4.% of severely underweight children under the age of six.
