Abstract

  Launched in 1975 by the Government of India, the ICDS scheme is currently the most important scheme in the field of child health and development and care of women throughout their critical stages in life. With four decades of implementation of this scheme, it is imperative to take stock of this flagship programme from its basic level of implementation in the country. The present study was thus conducted to determine the facilities available at selected Anganwadi centers and find out the concerns and performance of the Anganwadi Workers through observation, review of records and interviews. The study was conducted in 2 phases over a period of 3 months, in 15 Anganwadi Centers of the field practice area of a Rural Health Training Centre in Wardha district, Maharashtra. The 1st phase consisted of facility survey using pre-designed checklist while the 2nd phase consisted of in-depth interviews with the respective Anganwadi Workers. Facility survey revealed lack of storage, kitchen and toilet facilities in 5, 2 and 6 centers respectively. Hot Cooked Food was being served at 11 of the 15 centers. Peoples’ concern regarding quality of take home recipes, immunization days and improper utilization of learning material emerged as important issues compromising health promotion and pre-school education activities during the in-depth interviews. Bottlenecks identified through key functionaries of the scheme at community level would enable the administration take up coordinated steps to make it locally acceptable and reliable towards a fruitful impact in the nation.

Keywords: Anganwadi Centers; Supplementary Nutrition; Integrated Child Development Services; In-Depth Interviews

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Citation

Citation: Samarpita Dutta and Abhishek V Raut. “Knowing the Role of Supplementary Nutrition and Growth Monitoring from the Beneficiaries of Selected Anganwadi Centers in Rural Wardha, Maharashtra".Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 4.11 (2020): 09-15.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Samarpita Dutta and Abhishek V Raut. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.