Scope of the Integrated Child Development Scheme in Ensuring Holistic Development of the Child

The Government of India launched Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS) in the year 1975 to prevent malnutrition in children, reduce infant mortality rate, and empower the mothers to ensure holistic development of the child (1). Currently, the ICDS scheme symbolizes one of the most extensive and the unique initiative for safeguarding early childhood development, catering to more than 100 million under-six year children under the different provisions available in the scheme (2). In other words, ICDS reflects the country's obligation to enhance the preschool education rates and an effective strategy to break the vicious cycle of malnutrition, infection and mortality (3). The ICDS scheme was introduced on a nationwide scale to upgrade the nutritional and health status of children (0-6 years); to develop a framework for ensuring adequate physical, psychological and social development of the child; to minimize the incidence of morbidity, malnutrition, school dropout and mortality; to establish effective collaboration between different departments working for promoting child development; and finally to enable mothers to participate actively for meeting the health and nutritional needs of the child through proper nutrition and health education (1,4). A wide range of services encompassing supplementary nutrition; immunization services; health checkups for children less than six years of age; antenatal care of expectant mothers and postnatal care of nursing mothers; referral services to the beneficiaries who are in the need of prompt medical attention; non-formal preschool education for children in the 3-6 years age group; and nutrition & health education especially for the women in the 15-45 years age group are provided to the beneficiaries (4,5). The rationale to deliver a bunch of services is to mutually enhance the impact of a specific service with the aid of other services in the long-run (2). To exercise the delivery of services Anganwadi centres (AWCs) has been created in all regions of the country. All the AWCs are manned by members from the ICDS team-consisting of Anganwadi helpers, An-ganwadi workers, Supervisors, Child Development Project Officers (CDPOs) and District Program Officers (1,4). In the entire country, by the end of June 2013, 1373349 AWCs / mini-AWCs have been sanctioned, of which around 1339410 (97.5%) are operational. As far as the vacancy status is concerned, almost 33.9%, 35%, 7.1%, and 7.2% of CDPOs, Supervisors, Anganwadi workers and Anganwadi helpers posts are still vacant in the country. Furthermore, in the year 2013, around 8.48 crore children and 1.9 crore …