To combat malnutrition in Gujarat, Commissionerate of Women and Child Development, Government of Gujarat signed an MoU with Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar (IIPHG) to establish a State Resource Centre for Concurrent Monitoring of ICDS services in Gujarat (SRC-ICDS). Under this MoU, IIPHG will continuously assess the status of implementation of ICDS in terms of program gaps in coverage, outreach, coordination and capacity building. The objective of the concurrent monitoring is:
- To continuously assess the status of implementation of ICDS in terms of programme gaps in coverage, outreach, coordination and capacity building.
- To assess the skills and service delivery status particularly of supplementary nutrition, growth monitoring and use of WHO Child Growth Standards in ICDS.
- To identify the gaps and problems and constraints in the implementation of ICDS programme in 33 districts of Gujarat.
Under this initiative team would be deputed in every district and 4 major corporation areas of Gujarat. The SRC-ICDS team will also assess effective coverage and quality of service provision along with hand holding efforts to enhance the skills of anganwadi workers with relation to the following broad categories:
- Growth monitoring
- Supplementary nutrition
- Immunization
- Assessment of pre-school education
- Nutrition counselling
- Anemia status and management
- Severe underweight children
- Data Quality of Anganwadi centre
Each team will conduct field visit two Anganwadi Centres (AWC) per day, based on monthly progress report and will randomly cover enrolled beneficiaries. Every month 1,300 Anganwadi centres and 9,200 beneficiaries will be touched through this initiative. In order to achieve stated objectives, the State Resource Centre will:
- Build capacity of the staffs based on identified needs in consultation with ICDS.
- Identify risk pockets, possible population sub-groups that have propensity to be at high risk of chronic malnutrition or cognitive impairment using deep data analytics.
- Quarterly performance based ranking exercise of all 33 districts and all corporations of Gujarat in line with NITI Aayog’s plan to improve services.
- Third party evaluation for “Poshan Triveni Protsahan Purskar” as per indicators of Department of WCD.
