Unmet Need in Child Nutrition & Role of Integrated Child Development Services in India

Indian government has initiated the world’s largest Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in 1975 through community level anganwari centres (AWC). However, nearly half of the children under five years of age are still under nourished and merely one- third of babies are weighed immediately after birth. The present paper seeks the utilization of ICDS programme in India and examines the unmet need of the service to the children and their mothers and uses information from 51887 children (0-71 months), 55550 pregnant women, and 51837 lactating mothers from NFHS-3. The results show that only 32.9 percent children had received any services from AWC, which means two third of children did not received any services from AWC in the country. The unmet need is high in urban areas, with OBC membership and among Muslim. To reduce this unmet need one should focus up on why not people with high education and belong to upper strata of society utilized the ICDS services? The purpose of programme is to reach to every sections of the society with well acceptance and provide proper services to the target population. There must be some gap in the programme implementation which might make it not acceptable to all and create a cavity of unmet need.