To plug the gap between actual and enrolled beneficiaries, Anganwadi centres have been provided with bio-metric machines to give supplementary food to pregnant and lactating women, reports Amit Bhatt
With the intention to improving nutrition status and services of Anganwadi Centres by enhancing monitoring and tracking, the state government has started giving supplementary nutrition to pregnant women and lactating mothers by making use of bio-metric machines. Now they have to punch their fingers on bio-metric machine to get their hands on supplementary nutrition.
As a pilot project Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) department has installed bio-metric machines at 10 Anganwadi centres- 5 each in Amer (Jaipur) and Nivai (Tonk). The bio-metric device is attached to each smartphone given to Anganwadi workers which is connected to the server at the ICDS directorate with a mobile app to track and monitor the attendance of the beneficiaries.
“The objective is to ensure ICDS services help in improving health and nutritional status of the Anganwadi beneficiaries by tracking the food distribution,” said Manoj Jain, additional director (nutrition) at ICDS. “The process will help in tracking the gaps at the level of Anganwadi Centre and corrective measures will be taken accordingly to strengthen the ICDS services,” Jain added.
Under the ICDS scheme, supplementary nutrition contains sugar, edible oil and dry mixture of wheat, chana dal and soya bean flour and it is ready to eat after making a porridge after mixing it with water. It is given to the pregnant women and lactating mothers including children aged between 6-36 months at Anganwadi centres. Besides, the children aged 3-6 years registered at the centres get pre-school education and hot cooked meal on every working day.
The bio-metric system has been introduced to fight a few challenges in delivery of services for instance many a times the effective enrollment of beneficiaries are less than the actual beneficiaries in the catchment area of the Anganwadi Centre. There is a probable gap between actual number of beneficiaries who have availed services and the reported ones, thus the possibility of leakage in supplementary nutrition and hot cooked meal distribution always exists.
The pilot project was started in September and it will be surveyed in the last week of October to find out how many beneficiaries were registered and how many of them were benefited out of it. Meanwhile, on October 2, a team of National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog also have visited these Anganwadi Centers to evaluate the impact of the new system.
PILOT PROJECT
- As a pilot project, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) department has installed bio-metric machines at 10 Anganwadi centres- 5 each in Amer (Jaipur) and Nivai (Tonk).
- Bio-metric device is attached to each smartphone given to Anganwadi workers which is connected to the server at ICDS directorate with a mobile app.
FIXING LOOPHOLES
- The bio-metric system has been introduced to fight a few challenges in delivery of services for instance many a times the effective enrollment of beneficiaries are less than the actual beneficiaries in the catchment area of the Anganwadi Centre.
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