Health is Wealth: Modi Govt approves Nourishment Mission worth 9000 Cr to feed stomachs of half-starved

New Delhi, December 1: India is fighting against Malnourishment since a long time. National Nutrition Mission (NNM) is a weapon the government has taken in hands against the malnourishment. 

The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has approved setting up of NNM with a three year budget of Rs.9046.17 crore commencing from 2017-18 on Thursday.The NNM, as an apex body, will monitor, supervise, fix targets and guide the nutrition related interventions across the Ministries.

The programme through the targets will strive to reduce the level of stunting, under-nutrition, anemia and low birth weight babies. It will create synergy, ensure better monitoring, issue alerts for timely action, and encourage States and Union Territories (UT) to perform, guide and supervise the line Ministries and States/UTs to achieve the targeted goals.

The proposal consists of

· Mapping of various Schemes contributing towards addressing malnutrition

· introducing a very robust convergence mechanism

· ICT based Real Time Monitoring system

· incentivizing States/UTs for meeting the targets

· incentivizing Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) for using IT based tools

· eliminating registers used by AWWs

· introducing measurement of height of children at the Anganwadi Centres (AWCs)

· Social Audits

· setting-up Nutrition Resource Centres, involving masses through Jan Andolan for their participation on nutrition through various activities, among others.

Benefits & Coverage:

More than 10 crore people will be benefitted by this programme. All the States and districts will be covered in a phased manner i.e. 315 districts in 2017-18, 235 districts in 2018-19 and remaining districts in 2019-20.

Background:

There are a number of schemes directly/indirectly affecting the nutritional status of children (0-6 years age) and pregnant women and lactating mothers. Inspite of these, level of malnutrition and related problems in the country is high. There is no dearth of schemes but lack of creating synergy and linking the schemes with each other to achieve common goal. NNM through robust convergence mechanism and other components would strive to create the synergy.