“Model Gaon” inspires villages to be healthy and malnutrition-free

Dr Heera Lal, IAS, Additional Mission Director-UP National Health Mission and Sahil Sharma, MBA candidate at National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management (NIFTEM) highlights that India is steadily progressing to meet three key targets for maternal, infant and young child nutrition (MIYCN). The country’s response to its burden of malnutrition and rising anaemia must be functionally innovative

India celebrates ‘Rashtriya POSHAN Maah’ in the month of September every year. The goal is to create awareness about public health and nutrition. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overarching scheme, Poshan Abhiyaan for Holistic Nutrition, is India’s flagship programme to improve nutritional outcomes for children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating mothers, covering all states, districts and towns of our country without any discrimination of gender and social class. For several decades, India has confronted the challenge of eliminating rampant malnutrition in all age groups. The government of India has accorded high precedence to the concern of malnutrition and is making serious efforts to address this problem. The government implements several schemes and policies, including the Anganwadi Services Scheme, POSHAN Abhiyaan, Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana and the Scheme for Adolescent Girls under the Umbrella Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS) as targeted interventions for children under 6 years, pregnant women, lactating mothers and adolescent girls throughout the nation. All these programmes address one or more aspects of nutrition and have the potential to improve the country’s nutritional outcomes.

With Mission Poshan 2.0, the government seeks to reinforce nutritional content, delivery, outreach and outcomes with an emphasis on expanding practises that nurture health, wellness and immunity to lessen the rate of malnutrition. Continuous steps are being taken to enhance nutritional quality and testing in accredited labs, strengthen delivery and leverage technology under Poshan Tracker to improve governance. It is recommended to encourage use of AYUSH systems for the prevention of malnutrition and related diseases. Although guidelines are already issued for transparency and accountability in the delivery of supplementary nutrition and to track nutritional outcomes, there is a further need to support the growth of Poshan Vatikas at Anganwadi centres to meet the dietary diversity gap by leveraging traditional knowledge in nutritional practices.

India is steadily progressing to meet three key targets for maternal, infant and young child nutrition (MIYCN). The country’s response to its burden of malnutrition and rising anaemia must be functionally innovative. It is crucial to reflect on these challenges, which remain relentless, widespread and severe. Anaemia has major effects in terms of human health and development; it reduces the work capacity of human beings, in turn affecting the economy and overall national growth. Good and right nutrition has the strength to energise the present as well as future generations. India’s ultimate national wealth is its people — particularly women and children — but even after 75 years of independence, most of them are still struggling to get the required diet to meet their nutritional needs. A child’s nutritional status is directly linked to their mother. Poor nutrition among pregnant women impacts the nutritional status of the child and has a greater chance to influence future generations. This vicious cycle restricts the growth of the country, whose workforce, affected mentally and physically, has reduced work capacity. While there has been some improvement in tackling malnutrition among children and women over the past decade, the improvement has been modest at best. This is despite falling rates of poverty, enhanced self-sufficiency in food production, and the implementation of a range of government programmes. In fact, even the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) has shown insignificant development in different nutrition indicators, indicating that the rate of progress is low. As per the NFHS-5 data, there are not even adequate Nutrition Rehabilitation Centers (NRC) for Indian children suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM). In fact, screening the SAM children at the VHSND level will be an important step before recommending them to the NRCs. Children who do not have any medical complications should be treated through a community-based approach, and only those SAM children who have medical complications should be referred to the NRC. With SAM, if a child has a serious disease like a heart ailment, tuberculosis, etc., then it is necessary to reach the higher medical centre and make provisions for financial assistance.

There is a greater requirement now to boost investment in women’s and children’s health and nutrition to safeguard their sustainable development and enhance their quality of life. While the government’s emphasis has been on the establishment of numerous programmes to improve outcomes, there is a need for increased financial commitment. State and union territory budgets should also be used effectively to manage the state of malnutrition in their respective regions.

Diversification of agriculture in a sustainable way facilitates public health and nutrition. Food security, along with nutrition, access to safe drinking water and clean sanitation, assures less incidence of diseases and a better healthy environment. There is enormous potential for collaboration among the health, nutrition, and agriculture communities to address the challenges of poverty reduction, malnutrition reduction, and health improvement. Community-based management and empowerment play a significant role in eradicating malnutrition in rural India as well. We actively encourage a participatory approach to effectively promote holistic development in villages. However, there is a need to make continuous efforts if we wish to turn our villages into “Model Gaon.” For instance, community-led initiatives helped Banda improve its nutrition status. Banda Suposhan Karyakram helped children improve their overall health and nutrition status through a three-step scheme that showed positive results. Similarly, states and UTs need to plan, design, implement and execute various programmes to tackle malnutrition. The government has hit the right notes in addressing malnutrition issues. It should help the states and UTs to achieve that target of reducing severe acute malnutrition, moderate acute malnutrition, stunting, severe underweight and anaemia, thereby improving India’s chances of meeting the SDG 2030 global vision.