Current Affairs 2021: Salient Features of Poshan Abhiyaan

By Aman Kumar

Poshan Abhiyaan launched in India is dedicated to the nutritional development of the community as a whole. Read here the summary of the Poshan Abhiyaan launched by Narendra Modi.

In India, when we talk about Holistic development, several things come to our mind that there should be better education, infrastructure, basic income, farmers should get their rights, more employments, etc. But no one thinks of Nutritional Development that comes under the health development program. Nutritional development in India is one of the most necessary developments for women and children.  Currently, in our country, 68% of deaths occur under the age of 5 due to Malnutrition. The rank of India in the Global Hunger Index is 102 out of 117 countries.  And after the spread of COVID-19 all over India, there are many places where children are not getting proper food and this is happening because of loss of employment in the family, deaths of earning members, disturbance in the supply of government-subsidized food and ration, etc.

But the mortality rate in this decade is less as compared to the previous decade. As per the survey and the estimation of the Ministry of Health and the family Welfare, there is a decline in the death rate as per the following: -

• There were 83 deaths per 1000 live births in 2000 to 42 deaths in 2017 in the category of Under - 5 mortality rate. So, we can say that it is reduced by 49%.
• There were 38 deaths per 1000 live births in 2000 to 23 deaths in 2017 in the category of Neonatal Mortality rate. So, we can say that it is reduced by 38%.

So, we can say that there were 1.04 million deaths in 2017 as compared to 2.24 million deaths in 2000 in the category of under 5-year age groups. And there were 570,000 deaths in 2017 as compared to 1.02 million deaths in 2000 in the category of Neonatal Deaths.

(Note: - We are using the data till the years 2017 because the government had submitted the surveyed report till 2017). 

To tackle these death ratios and to create a good health infrastructure, the government of India launched “Poshan Abhiyan”. Poshan Abhiyan was launched on March 8, 2018, on the occasion of International Women’s Day in the Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan. The main motto of POSHAN (Prime Minister Over searching Of Holistic Nutrition) is to provide nutritional support to adolescent girls, pregnant women, lactating mothers, and children from 0-6 years of age. It is being run in several phases across the country. The government had attached this programme with the technology so that it can help target the actual needy persons.

This programme has several objectives such as to reduce the malnutrition effect in children aged 0-6 years, to reduce the anaemia effect in young children, women, adolescent girls and to reduce low weight births. For this, they had launched a software named ICDAS-CAS, which helps track all the systems of Poshan Abhiyan. Under this Poshan Abhiyan, they had launched several events such as Poshan Phakwada, Community based events, Village Health Sanitation Nutrition Day, etc.