POSHAN Abhiyaan

POSHAN Abhiyaan

News: More than half the funds for POSHAN Abhiyaan remained unutilized as stated by the 4th progress report released by the NITI Aayog.

What is Poshan Abhiyaan?
• The programme seeks to improve nutritional outcomes for children, pregnant women and lactating mothers.
• It was launched in 2018 with specific targets to be achieved by 2022.
• It aimed to reduce Stunting and wasting by 2% a year (total 6% until 2022) among children.
• To reduce Anemia by 3% a year (total 9%) among children, adolescent girls and pregnant women and lactating mothers.
• Target - To bring down stunting among children in the age group 0-6 years from 38.4% to 25% by 2022.

What are key findings of the report?
• It was observed that less than half the funds set aside for the Poshan Abhiyaan have been utilized by India’s states.
• The States and Union territories (UTs) with poor distribution of mobile phones and growth monitoring devices emerged as those with low fund utilization.
• Only three states had used more than 50 per cent of their POSHAN Abhiyaan funds between 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. This improved marginally to 12 between 2017-2019 and FY 2019-2020.
• On a scale of 0-100, only Punjab scored less than 50 among the large states. Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Mizoram were the poor performers among the small states while no UT scored less than 50.
• However, interventions across human resources, infrastructure, supplies, training and capacity building under the programme has improved compared to the previous progress report.

What are the 5 key elements of Poshan Abhiyaan scheme as listed by the report?
• Deliver a high-impact package of interventions in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. Strengthen the delivery of these interventions through technology and management.
• Improve the capacity of frontline workers.
• Facilitate cross-sectoral convergence to address the multi-dimensional nature of malnutrition.
• Enhance behavior change and community mobilization.