Goal to be set for states on nutrition for children

The Women and Child Development Ministry decides to sign MoU with the state governments on specific goals for reducing malnutrition, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 28, 2007, 22:39:38 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government will soon set basic nutrition standards for the states in the revised Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).

Indian children are considered even more malnourished than the ones in sub-saharan Africa. Over 40 per cent of Indian children are malnourished and the figure is more than 50 per cent in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The Women and Child Development Ministry has decided that the Memorandum of Understanding will be signed with the state governments on specific goals for reducing malnutrition. The MoU will also have specific goals for promoting early childhood development, a ministry official said.

The ICDS, which received flak from the Supreme Court for poor implementation, is being restructured on the pattern of Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and National Rural Health Mission. About 30 per cent of the funds under the scheme would be earmarked for infrastructure development including anganwadi centre buildings and baby toilets, an official said. Each anganwadi centre would cost Rs 1.75-2 lakh.

The government is also looking at public private and community participation for childcare and bringing in transparency and accountability in delivery of services. “We would like to involve NGOs, Panchayati Raj Institutions and mother committees for monitoring,” an official said. The government also talks about convergence of various schemes through state, district, block and village coordination committees.

In the revised scheme, the ministry wants the states, except northeastern states, to share the financial burden. For northeast, the centre will bear 75 per cent burden of total project cost, an official said. The funding pattern adopted is similar to the one for SSA, strongly opposed by the state governments.

Ministry officials say the revised scheme would be implemented before end of 2007.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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