After withholding the release of State-wise findings of Unicef’s Rapid Survey on Children for months, the Women and Child Development Ministry on Wednesday finally accepted the report and will release the findings on its website shortly.
A senior official in the Ministry said the committee constituted to revisit the report and study its methodology accepted the findings with certain “pre-conditions” or “caveats.”
“The committee has reached a consensus on the report. Their finding shows that there may be a marginal error of two or three per cent in cases where the sample size is not in proportion to the recommended ratio,” said the official from the WCD Ministry.
The official said the committee agreed that the sample size of the survey was less in some States as it was not according to the population of the State.
“The entire report will soon be uploaded on the WCD Ministry’s website now,” the official said.
“The weightage should be given when you consider the findings in States where adequate sample size is not followed and there one has to reckon for a marginal error,” said the official.
He said the overall outcome of the report shows sign of improvement. “Overall the malnutrition has been reduced to around 29.6 per cent from 42 per cent approximately. But the performance of some individual States may be weak. Some States have performed better, some have not,” he said.
Even as the Government released the national-level findings in 2014, the State-wise findings were held back by the Ministry as it indicated a significant dip in the immunisation cover of children in certain States like Gujarat and Bengal.
The survey that mainly focused on the well being of children below six years and their mothers, covering aspects of child development, maternal care and school attendance covered 1,05,483 households and 5,630 anganwadi centres (AWC) leading to more than 2,10,000 interviews.
For compiling nutritional status, measurement of height and weight of over 90,000 children aged 0-4 and over 28,000 adolescent girls aged 10-18 was collected across all States.