Panchyat & Nutrition. Panchayats, undoubtedly, can and should play a critical role in reducing child malnourishment at village level. Particularly, with women constituting 33% to 50% of the PRIs, the panchayat representatives could play the important role of change maker and champions of the cause. The role of Panchayats could be looked into at three levels- 1. Ensuring food-based interventions such as Mid-day Meal, Take Home Rations are made available on a regular basis and in right quantity and of good quality. Along with this, prescribed health practices during and post pregnancy such as Ante and Post Natal check-ups as per schedule are availed along with proper food habits by pregnant and lactating mothers; encourage families to go for institutional deliveries and do follow-up with concerned officials to ensure JSY benefits reach the eligible women. Each panchayat member should be assigned or should a kind of ‘adopt’ and monitor a certain number (may be 4-5 per year) of such families, to ensure that the woman is not anemic and new-born/infants are not underweight. They could do a regular follow-up with families as well as frontline health workers (ASHAs/AWWs) about the status of pregnant/lactating mothers and children. 2. Panchayats can also play an important role towards addressing malnourishment problem in a holistic manner i.e. the interventions, which can be grouped as nutrition-supportive interventions, include in addition to above mentioned initiatives and interventions, WASH related interventions-improved liquid and solid waste management, potable drinking water; livelihood and employment based support and opportunities, better housing facility, among others are provided to families identified with having Severely Acute Malnourished (SAM) children. 3. As an initiative, the Panchayats with no malnourished children for a period of one year should be given some incentives to set good examples for others. However, it is important to learn from the experience of Nirmal Gram Puraskar, to ensure ‘real performing’ panchayats get awarded. For this a Child Tracking Management Information System (CTMIS) should be developed to track the growth-details and other critical indicators of each child born and even the pregnant and lactating mothers in each village to ensure that all records are transparent and no malpractices takes place, such as omission of SAM children from the list etc. Social audit should also be made an integral part of monitoring the reduction in number of malnourished children. The panchayats with ‘zero or near-zero incidences’ of malnourished children should be recognized and awarded. These measures will ensure better targeting of reduction in number of malnourished children and this problem as a whole, through panchayats.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:41:36 +0000
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