The secretary of the Women and Child Development Ministry, Rakesh Srivastava, said that since data will be collected in real-time, it will help identify different patterns in the data.
Data on health parameters for nutrition of women and children in anganwadis will now be collected on a yearly basis. So far, the government has been relying on the decadal National Family Health Survey data. The Women and Child Development Ministry will collect data on stunted growth, weight, intake of nutrition, etc, on a real-time basis through the tablets they had launched in anganwadi centres.
The secretary of the Women and Child Development Ministry, Rakesh Srivastava, said that since data will be collected in real-time, it will help identify different patterns in the data. He added that the exercise has helped the ministry find out if any state has misreported the number of beneficiaries. However, he said it was too soon to divulge the names of those states.
Rahul Mullick of the Gates Foundation said that the ministry’s own data analysis will help it. “The NFHS is a survey and is dependent on the respondent’s reply. The CAS will be fed by anganwadi workers, who will collect this data as per set standards,” he said.
These tablets will be sent to over 10 lakh anganwadi workers across the country. Android phones with an operating system version of 4.4 or above will be handed out, which supports 3G, 4G and wi-fi connectivity, with a screen size of 5 inch and a ram of 1GB.
Dr Soumya Swaminathan of the ICMR said that the move will be very useful. “The NFHS data is usually delayed and comes after a gap of ten years, which is too long a time to look at changes. Real-time has its own advantages because timely feedback on the impact of any intervention allows for course correction,” said Dr Swaminathan.
Gates foundation’s support
The WCD Ministry signed a MoC with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in May last year. As per the agreement, the Gates Foundation was to provide technological support for exercise with ICT by developing and implementing the Common Application Software (CAS) under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).
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