Pregnant women, lactating mothers focus for Poshan Abhiyan, says WCD Dept

New delhi: The Delhi Government WCD department has now turned its focus towards strengthening the Poshan Abhiyan programme to reach out to more pregnant women, lactating mothers and children with nutrition-related interventions.

Poshan Abhiyan is a programme to improve nutritional outcomes for children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating mothers by leveraging technology, a targeted approach and convergence.

According to the WCD Department, recently, they have augmented human resources along with system strengthening. "More than 100 positions after following a detailed process of shortlisting and interviews from thousands of applications that had been received by the Department online," the official said.

Rashmi Singh, Director of the WCD Department, said, "Not just outreach - It is an attempt to bring greater efficiency in the manner resources are spent by better data management systems and monitoring mechanisms."

As per officials, to create more accountable systems, the digital platforms provided by Poshan Tracker were rolled out.

"This has enabled real-time monitoring with regards to process monitoring of nutritional level interventions under ICDS (Integrated Child Development Services)," one official said. As per the data provided by DWCD, as many as 4,70,699 beneficiaries could be registered on the portal up to March 21.

As per the official, some design-related challenges in the application such as for pregnant women and only one child could be marked, non-inclusion of lactating mothers even though the pregnant mother was included, were highlighted to the WCD Ministry.