National nutrition monitoring bureau in India-An overview

Abstract

The nutritional surveillance system in our country is in the offing and is still at the stage of infancy. Nevertheless the system of nutritional montoring is fairly well established at least in the States where National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB) is in operation. Nutrition monitoring helps to assess nutritonal problems prevalent in the community in terms of their nature magnitude and distribution among the population groups as well as geographical areas. Such monitoring over a period of time. This information is necessary to evolve policies to formulate appropriate programmes and implement the same for the prevention and effective control of nutritional deficiency disorders. It highlights the need to evaluate the ongoing nutrition programmes identification of bottlenecks if any and to initiate corrective steps wherever necessary. Prior to 1972 the State nutrition bureaus were collecting date on nutritional status of communities in their respective States. However most of them weresporadic and were often based on different survey methodologies and inadequate sample size rendering such data non comparable between the States. Therefore in the year 1972 the NNMB units were established in 10 States viz. Andhra Pradesh Karnataka Kerala Tamil Nadu Maharashtra Madhya Pradesh Orissa Uttar Pradesh Gujarat and West Bengal under the aegis of National Institute of Nutrition Indian Council of Medical research. Since its inception these have been collecting information on diet & nutritional status of communities on a regular basis with the main objective to develop a reliable database on nutrition status of communities on a regular basis based on systematic surveys carried out by adopting statistically valid sampling designs and sample sizes and by using standard methodologies uniformly in all the States. (excerpt)