The Prime Minister announce of the importance of providing proper nutrition to children. He said Mission Indradhanush has brought an extremely positive change in the lives of women and children. The acronym PM should remind everyone of ‘Poshan Mission’ from now onwards, Shri Narendra Modi said in a lighter vein. The Prime Minister further emphasized that both the National Nutrition Mission and Beti Bachao Beti Padhao should be run in the form of a Jan Andolan to make them a success on the ground.
Malnutrition as characterized by under-nutrition, over-nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies has a negative impact on the socio-economic development of any nation. Malnutrition erodes social and economic gains made and put countries in a vicious cycle of poor nutritional status, high disease burden and increased poverty. Malnutrition has a significant inter-generational effect and must be addressed in its entirety for any meaningful development to take place. It causes low work productivity, absenteeism from work and school due to illnesses and poor intellectual performance among school children. Malnutrition contributes to about 60% of childhood mortality in the world.
Therefore, to achieve the nutrition-related Goals, it is imperative to put in place, mechanisms for sustained funding for nutrition programmes.
The mission, commencing 2017-18, has a target to reduce under-nutrition and low birth-weight by 2 per cent each year.
• It will strive to achieve reduction in stunting from 38.4 per cent as per the National Family Health Survey-4 to 25 per cent by 2022.
• It also aims to bring down anaemia among young children, women and adolescent girls by three per cent per year.
• Under NNM, the ministries of women and child development, health and family welfare, and water and sanitation will work together.
• The mission will form an apex body that would fix targets and monitor, supervise and guide nutrition-related interventions across the ministries.
• The mission would include several components like an ICT (information and communications technology)-based real-time monitoring system, incentivizing of states and Union territories to meet their targets, social audits, and setting up of nutrition resource centres.
• Anganwadi workers will also be offered incentives for using IT-based tools such as smart phones.
• Aadhaar card is a mandatory requirement to avail the benefits of the mission,
Implementation strategy would be based on intense monitoring and Convergence Action Plan right upto the grass root level. NNM will be rolled out in three phases from 2017-18 to 2019-20. NNM targets to reduce stunting, under-nutrition, anemia (among young children, women and adolescent girls) and reduce low birth weight by 2%, 2%, 3% and 2% per annum respectively. Although the target to reduce Stunting is atleast 2% p.a., Mission would strive to achieve reduction in Stunting from 38.4% (NFHS-4) to 25% by 2022 (Mission 25 by 2022).
