The Women and Child Development (WCD) Ministry has been pulled up by a parliamentary panel for failing to achieve the target of opening 14 lakh anganwadi centres in India by December 2008 for the benefit of several lakh children.
Anganwadi Centres are funded by the centrally-sponsored Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) for providing supplementary nutrition, non-formal pre-school education, immunisation and health check-up for children aged up to six years.
According to the panel’s report, the WCD Ministry was to open a minimum of 14 lakh anganwadi centres (AWCs) by December 2008, in a phased manner. However, it sanctioned 13.71 lakh centres and could operationalise 13.17 lakh which is a shortfall of 54,000. Till October 2014, more than 33,000 such centres were pending to be operationalised.
“The panel is disappointed to find that despite a restructured and strengthened ICDS launched with an allocation of Rs1,23,580 crore in 2012, the Ministry is unlikely to achieve the target of covering 14 lakh habitations by AWCs in foreseeable future, the dealing was December 2008,” said the panel headed by KV Thomas, in its report on Public Accounts.
It called on the Ministry to take urgent steps to operationalise all pending sanctioned AWCs/mini AWCs and try to reach the target of covering 14 lakh habitations.
“The Ministry needs to prescribe and strictly adhere to the time-lines for setting up these anganwadis,” the panel said, while asking for the report of Concurrent Independent Evaluation of ICDS that was carried out by Central Monitoring Unit in 100 blocks of high burden districts during 2013-14.