A parliamentary panel today criticised the Women and Child Development (WCD) Ministry for failing to achieve the target of opening 14 lakh anganwadi centres in the country by December 2008 for better utilisation of Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) funds.
Centrally-sponsored ICDS provides for supplementary nutrition, non-formal pre-school education, immunisation and health check-up for children aged up to six years.
According to a report of the panel, the 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.
"It is disappointed to find that even after a restructured and strengthened ICDS has been launched in 2012 with an allocation of Rs 1,23,580 crore, 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 endeavour to reach the target of covering 14 lakh habitations at the earliest.
"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.
Most of the pending AWCs have been reportedly due to court cases, financial processes involved and delay in recruitment of anganwadi workers and helpers.
The scheme of ICDS was launched in 1975 with 33 projects and 4,891 AWCs and was gradually expanded to 5,652 projects and six lakh sanctioned centres in the country. The scheme today operates through a network of 7,067 fully operational projects and 13.42 lakh AWCs as on March 2014, covering a total of 1,045.08 lakh beneficiaries.
