Utilization of Anganwadi Centres under ICDS Program for Maternal and Child Health Care in India.

Social Science

Government of India has implemented various health programs like National Health Mission in all the states, but still there existed inter state, inter district and inter block variations in achieving health goals. Integrated Child Development Scheme, ICDS was initiated to address the nutritional health status of children in the age group of 0-6 years. The child malnutrition is still a major problem in India and nearly three-fourths of the states/UTs have below the nutritional status compared with the Indian average (NFHS 4: Underweight: 35.8 percent). It is clear that the effectiveness of ICDS program is not satisfactory even after 40 years of implementation of the program. The data from the Rapid survey on children conducted by Ministry of women and child development, GoI during 2013-14 in 29 states of India was considered for this study. The objective of this study is to assess the performance of Anganwadi centres under ICDS program for maternal and child health care and to suggest to improve the performance of AWCs. Nutrition education to mothers, awareness creating through AWCs, monitoring mechanism and infrastructure development will help to improve the performance of ICDS centres to achieve health goals uniformly throughout the states.

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