Cabinet likely to approve Rs 9,000 cr National Nutrition Mission to check malnutrition

New Delhi: In a major policy initiative, a Rs 9,000 crore National Nutrition Mission (NNM) may be launched by the government this month. A brainchild of the Niti Aayog, sources said that it is likely to receive the union cabinet’s nod this week itself. The NNM on a pilot basis, is already running in around 50,000 aanganwadis, which have been given mobile connectivity and their data on malnourished children is being tracked on real time basis.

The government plans to conduct real time monitoring of malnourished children with the help of an electronic database of all aanganwadis, which will in turn track these children and initiate steps to check infant mortality rate (IMR) as well as improve parameters like life expectancy of such infants.

The Centre aims to provide mobile phone connectivity to all aanganwadis, which will help in sharing all the data collected under NNM with these rural maternity centres. Following this, the aanganwadis will be incentivised to provide better nutritional care to these children. To arrest growing IMR, the initiative will on tracking the nutrition of such children from the time of their birth till they touch two years. So, the database of all expecting mothers and also that of all mothers and children in the age-group of zero to 24 months will be maintained.

This newspaper had reported on September 18 how the Niti Aayog has flagged off issues like slow progress on important indicators like IMR, life expectancy and malnutrition as well as inadequate number of toilets.