Know What is Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme: Aims,Objectives and Benefits — TextBooq

5 min readNov 27, 2020

Full form of Poshan Abhiyaan is Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition which is also known as National Nutrition Mission. The Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme is basically a flagship scheme of the government of India with an aim to improve the nutritional outcomes of the children, the pregnant women and lactating mothers. The scheme was launched in the year 2018. NITI Aayog has played a very important role in formulating and shaping the scheme.

Here we will discuss the Know what is Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme and Aims, Objectives and Benefits of the same. The article will be beneficial for Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme UPSC, Essay on Poshan Abhiyaan and Poshan Abhiyaan question and answer and quiz.

The genesis of Poshan Abhiyaan

In 2017, a roadmap strategy of the scheme was released by NITI Aayog. NITI Aayog presented, provided and analyzed all the basic problems of malnutrition and proposed an idea on how can we overcome these problems of malnutrition. All the recommendations made by NITI Aayog in 2017, were made part of Poshan Abhiyaan and NITI Aayog became the governing body of the scheme.

NITI Aayog submits status reports in every 6 months to the prime minister’s office

Union Ministry of Women and Child Development has decided to observe September as the National Nutrition Month or Rashtriya Poshan Maah to promote a nation-wide fight against malnutrition. Rashtriya Poshan Maah meaning: Rashtriya means National, Poshan means Nutrition and Mah means Month

Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme was launched in March 2018 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan.
National Nutrition Mission (NNM) was approved with a three-year budget of 9046.17 crores from the financial year 2017–18.
The scheme is being implemented by the Ministry of women and child development.

Functional Structure of Poshan Abhiyaan

National Council on Nutrition (NCN) was set up under the Poshan Abhiyaan
The National Council on Nutrition is headed by the Vice-Chairman of the NITI Aayog.
It would provide policy directions to address nutritional challenges in the country.
It is a coordination and convergence body on the nutrition of national importance
The World Bank has granted $200 million for the implementation of the National Nutrition Mission.

Know What is Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme: Aims,Objectives and Benefits

Aims and Objectives of Poshan Abhiyaan

NITI Aayog has decided to set a target of Poshan Abhiyaan Scheme

Poshan Abhiyaan is aiming to reduce stunting of children of 2% per anum.
Poshan Abhiyaan mission will also have a special focus on reduction in Stunting of children from 38.4% to 25% by 2022. It is named as Mission 25 by 2022.
It will be done by improving the utilization of key Anganwadi services and improving the quality of Anganwadi Services delivery.
Poshan Abhiyaan will also focus in reducing the low birth weight of babies by 2%, 2%, 3% and 2% per annum respectively, undernutrition and prevalence of anaemia etc among young children, women and adolescent girls.

As per the reports published by the National Family Health Survey-4, 18% of children are born underweight.

Salient Features of the Poshan Abhiyaan

Benefits of Poshan Abhiyaan will be enjoyed more than 10 crore people in the country.
All the States/ Union Territories and districts will be covered in a phased manner.
Anganwari centres (AWCs) are the primary operating points of POSHAN Abhiyaan. Operating points will be Poshan Abhiyaan ICDS or Poshan ABhiyaan Integrated Child Development Services.
The official portal of Poshan Abhiyaan http://poshanabhiyaan.gov.in/#/
The Ministry of Women and Child Development is planning to develop an atlas to map crops and food grains in the country to promote regional cropping pattern and nutritious protein-rich food in local areas to aid Poshan Abhiyaan.
The slogan of Poshan Abhiyaan 2020 is “Har Ghar Poshan Vyavahar”
The Brand Ambassador of Poshan Abhiyaan is Amitabh Bachchan.

Poshan Abhiyaan Fund Allocation and Budget

The fund for the scheme has two different sources. 50 % of the fund will be Government Budgetary Support and rest 50% will be provided by The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the lending arm of World Bank Group and Multilateral Development Bank(MDB).
Government budgetary support would be distributed at the ratio of 60:40 between Centre and States/UTs, 90:10 for North-East regions and the Himalayan States and 100% for UTs without legislature.
Allocations of the budget for Poshan Abhiyaan in the Financial Year (FY) 2017–18 and FY 2019–20 is 7,411 crore which is almost triple of its anticipated share of 2,850 crores.
Poshan Abhiyaan Budget 2020 is 3,700 crore, almost 9 per cent increase from the previous year’s

The Convergence of the scheme

Poshan Abhiyan is aiming to achieve convergence through

Coordination between the Department of Social welfare and Health and family welfare
Drinking water and sanitation
Rural development
Panchayati raj
Food and other concerned departments

Ways Forward

The success of Poshan Abhiyaan depends upon the collective efforts of all convergent departments along with the perfect utilization of Anganwadi Services. The Ministry of Women and Child Development and NITI Aayog should focus on ensuring good quality, accessible and affordable maternal healthcare services for all women in the country, starting from block to district level of every state. People’s participation completely depends on awareness. Hence awareness campaign around the country is an essential tool of the implementation of the scheme.

The government of India also need to address the issues of girl-dropout from schools, early marriage of girls, delaying first pregnancy and adequate spacing between births to provide an inclusive contribution to healthier nutrition.

Recently, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has published a report, which revealed the harsh truth of the implementation of the ambitious nutrition scheme in India. The report cites that current pace of the implementation of National Nutrition Mission is way too slow to the anticipated growth. Thus the scheme is unable to achieve it’s target of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) on child malnutrition.

The report also emphasized that the implementation of infant young child feeding (IYCF) practices promoted by the POSHAN scheme is very poor and not exercised on the ground level.

Hence the Government of India needs to address the issue as soon as possible to figure out and fix all the hindrances for the overall success of such a progressive and forward-looking scheme.

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