Beneficiaries

♤ Children in the age group of 0-6 years

♤ Pregnant women and Lactating mothers

The ICDS Scheme offers a package of six services, viz. supplementary nutrition; pre-school non- formal education; nutrition & health education; immunization; health check-up; and referral services.

Performance Evaluation of ICDS

The services under the ICDS scheme are provided at the platform of Anganwadi Centre (AWC). As per a report by Programme Evaluation Organization(PEO) of NITI Aayog submitted in June 2015, ICDS covers 8.4 crore out of the total 16.45 crore children of age below 6 years in the country and 1.91 crore pregnant and lactating mothers through 7,066 projects and 13.42 lakh AWCs. Major highlights of report are following-

♤ It was found that 75.7% of AWCs are maintaining records properly, however, problems were noticed in records maintained by the remaining 24.3% of AWCs.

♤ It was noticed that 99% of AWCs are providing mothers counselling on the child healthcare

and 68.6% of AWCs are intervening on children’s malnutrition.

♤ Further, 22.5% of AWCs do not have the required medicines for the children.

♤ Scrutiny of health records maintained by AWCs for the month of December, 2013 revealed

74.6 %, 19.7 % and 5.7 % of children had Normal (N), moderately malnourished (MM) and severely malnourished (SM) health respectively.

♤ The on the spot weight measurement carried out by the evaluation teams during April, 2014 revealed that 77.4 %, 17.6% and 5 % of the sample children had N, MM and SM health status.

♤ Physical verification of the infrastructure and supports provided to AWCs revealed that 59% of them have adequate space, and thus the remaining 41% have either shortage of space or unsuitable accommodation. It was also found that 40% of AWCs have their own accommodation and the remaining 60% are located in rented accommodations.

♤ Study found that 86.3% of AWCs have drinking water facilities and the remaining 13.7% do not have safe drinking water facilities. Further, the hygiene conditions at AWCs require improvement as only 48.2% of them are maintaining good hygiene condition.