Identifying poor governance and low motivation levels as causes for the inefficiency of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), a group of economists led by Jean Dreze has urged the Planning Commission to involve panchayats in the programme aimed at improving health and nutritional status of children.

Involve communities
Recommending an overhauling of the Integrated Child Development Services, one of the largest public service delivery systems in the country, the experts said decentralisation and involvement of communities was the first key aspect that should be considered in the 11th Plan.

The recommendation comes at a time when the National Family Health Survey has revealed that one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India.

Taking up the issue of malnutrition on an emergency basis the Supreme Court had also directed the Centre and the state governments that there should be functional anganwadi centres for children and pregnant women in every settlement.

It also asked the governments to ensure that supplementary nutrition was provided to each child under the age of six years and to all pregnant and nursing mothers.

The current allocation for the Integrated Child Development Services is Rs 1,600 crore, which should ideally be increased to Rs 9,600 crore if the coverage has to be improved.

Inadequate
The present coverage is also inadequate as there are only six lakh anganwadis in the country whereas 17 lakh anganwadis are required for universal coverage of the scheme.

The expert group, which also included activists like Dr Arun Gupta, Dipa Sinha and Biraj Patnaik, observed that there were large areas of untapped potential for community contribution.

“Except for rare instances like the Mitanin programme in Chattisgarh or the work of the Rajmata Jijau Mission in Aurangabad, the involvement of communities and Panchayats has rarely gone beyond sub-contracting tasks like the cooking of the meals with very little real financial or other powers,” the experts said in their report.

Mobilisation
They also observed that community mobilisation was required to create an  atmosphere for more appropriate child care practices and empowerment of the local community, especially families facing marginalisation or social exclusion.

Community monitoring of Integrated Child Development Services could also help in ensuring greater regularity and quality and in building a more functional relationship between the anganwadi worker and the community.