An evaluation study of Anganwadis under ICDS in India

Abstract

Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme has expanded tremendously over the 30 years of its operation to cover almost all the development blocks in the country. It offers a wide range of health, nutrition and education related services to children, women and adolescent girls. The study wish to find out the impact and efficacy of the ICDS scheme. The study was conducted from April 2019 to December 2019. The study was conducted on purposive random sampling basis covering 19 States/UTs. 510 AWCs were selected and total 15300 children were covered. One of the important findings of the study is that the children in the Normal grade are found to be 77.4% of the total sample size which means that in spite of a lot of bottlenecks, the malnutrition has been reduced among the children of 0 to 5 years of age. As envisages from the field study, people are well aware of the ICDS scheme and are sending their children to AWCs. However, the children from remote areas are not able to avail these facilities. The opening of public nursery school in urban and rural areas poses a great threat to the enrollment of children in AWCs nowadays unless the infrastructural and other facilities of AWCs are upgraded. The working conditions and remuneration of AWC workers needs to be looked at sympathetically. The findings of the study are expected to help policymakers and programme implementing bodies to take appropriate corrective measures to make the ICDS more effective and thereby bringing down the malnutrition in children to zero level.