Anganwadi

The Ministry of Women Development and Child Welfare has laid down guidelines for the responsibilities of Anganwadi workers. These guidelines include showing community support and active participation in executing this program, conducting regular quick surveys of all families, organizing pre-school activities, providing health and nutrition education to families, especially pregnant women, motivating families to adopt family planning, educating parents about child growth and development, assisting in the implementation and execution of Kishori Shakti Yojana, educating teenage girls and parents by organizing social awareness programs, and identifying disabilities in children.

A Mukhya Sevika supervises between 40 and 65 Anganwadi workers, providing them with on-the-job training. Mukhya Sevikas' other duties include keeping track of people of lower economic status benefiting from the program, in particular the malnourished; guiding the Anganwadi workers in assessing children's age and weight and plotting their weight; demonstrating effective methods of providing health and nutrition education to mothers; and maintaining statistics on Anganwadis and their workers to determine what can be improved. The Mukhya Sevikas report to the Child Development Projects.

Despite decades of impressive growth, India has an acute shortage of doctors.[3] The doctor population ratio in 2019-20 was 1:1456; against the WHO recommended level of 1:1000.[4] Through the Anganwadi system, the country is trying to meet its goal of providing affordable and accessible healthcare to local populations.

Anganwadi workers have the advantage over the physicians living in the same rural area, which gives them insight into the state of health in the locality and assists in identifying the cause of problems and in countering them. They also have better social skills and can therefore more easily interact with the local people. As locals, they know and are comfortable with the local language and ways, are acquainted with the people, and are trusted.[5]

Public policy discussions have taken place over whether to make Anganwadis universally available to all eligible children and mothers who want their children there. This would require significant increases in budgetary allocation and a rise in the number of Anganwadis to over 16 lakh.

The officers and their helpers who staff Anganwadis are typically women from poor families. The workers do not have permanent jobs with comprehensive retirement benefits like other government staff. Worker protests (by the All India Anganwadi Workers Federation) and public debates on this topic are ongoing. There are periodic reports of corruption and crimes against women in some Anganwadi centers.[6][7] There are legal and societal issues when Anganwadi-serviced children fall sick or die.[8]

In announcing the 2022 budget, then Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that salaries would be increased for Anganwadi workers to ₹20,105 per month and for helpers to ₹10,000 per month.[9]

In March 2008 there was debate about whether packaged foods (such as biscuits) should become part of the food served. Detractors, including Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, argued against it, saying that it will become the only food consumed by the children. Options for increasing partnerships with the private sector are continuing.

In a major initiative, the work of Anganwadis is being digitized, starting with the 27 most economically disadvantaged districts in Uttar Pradesh: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. In March 2021, Anganwadis' workers were provided with a smartphone app to record data that will be integrated with the health ministry, which is involved in carrying out immunization, health check-ups, and nutrition education under Integrated Child Development Services. They were informed that failure to upload digitally-entered records could result in salary and food suspension. Difficulties emerged with this smartphone app's reportedly being hard to use, being written in only English, and demanding more memory than cheap smartphones have. Anganwadi employees, mostly women who earn less than $150 a month, if they even have smartphones, experienced repeated crashes of this app or found that they do not understand enough English to use it. Many lack phone reception and electricity in their villages and ask why meticulously written ledgers, used for years, no longer suffice.[10]

The Integrated Child Development Services scheme did not have provision for the construction of AWC buildings as this was envisaged to be provided by the community except for the North Eastern States. For them, financial support was provided for construction of AWC buildings since 2001-02 at a unit cost of ₹175,000.

As part of the strengthening and restructuring the ICDS scheme, the government approved a provision of construction of 200,000 Anganwadi centre buildings at a cost of ₹450,000 per unit during XII Plan period in a phased manner with a cost-sharing ratio of 75:25 between centre and states (other than the NER, where it will be at 90:10).

Further, construction of AWC has been notified as a permissible activity under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). The construction of AWC buildings can be taken up in convergence with MNREGA.[11]

UNICEF and the UN Millennium Development Goals of reducing infant mortality and improving maternal care are the impetus for increasing focus on the Anganwadis. Workers and helpers are expected to be trained per WHO standards.

• Auxiliary nurse midwife
• Accredited Social Health Activist

• Official website
• Anganwadi services scheme
• ICDS
• Anganwadis of Kerala

• Anganwadi Information - https://web.archive.org/web/20120331041500/http://healthopine.com/healthcare-infrastructure/the-anganwadi-workers-of-india-connecting-for-health-at-the-grassroots