Meghalaya Govt to upgrade over 2000 anganwadi centres to ECD centres in next 2 years: Sampath Kumar

Syllad | The Rising MeghalayaOctober 29, 2024

The state government has decided to upgrade over 2000 anganwadi centres to early child development (ECD) centres in the state.

Informing this after chairing a review meeting here on Monday, Principal Secretary in-charge Health & Family Welfare Sampath Kumar said, “In the next two years, we will upgrade 2000 (anganwadi centres) as ECD centres.”

He said Meghalaya is the first state to start a comprehensive early child development mission.

“As part of that today we had a review with all partners. Early child development consists of different levels of work involving health, social welfare, education and community rural development departments. So basically there are lots of works that happen under ECD, essentially how we can support the children, the pregnant mothers, the lactating mother, in terms of how we can provide nutrition,” Kumar added.

He informed that the department has involved IIT, Bombay for providing training to mothers on effectiveness of breastfeeding techniques in order to provide better nutrition to the children.

“Similarly we also have massive programs to upgrade all the Aganwadi centers as ECD centers in the sense that they will be able to provide better learning and experience to children when they go to Aganwadi centers. So for that again we have taken some top architect to think about innovative design, how ECD can provide such learning environment,” the principal secretary said while adding “These Centers will be constructed with the help of the community and rural development that we have, so under that we have NERGS we are going to constructed and upgrade the Aganwadi centers with some support from ADB also.”

“It is a project involving convergence of different programs and projects but the purpose is how we can provide better support, better experience for the children and pregnant mothers and lactating mothers,” he added further.

Asked, Kumar said that the IIT Bombay has come up with an interesting and scientific method of teaching the caregivers and mothers of how actually one can address stunting through effective breastfeeding, “There are different techniques of how the milk transfers that would lead to weight gain, so it is very scientific exercise.”

He informed that the program has started in many places. Altogether, 40 trainers have been trained and further training is going to happen. “We also have taken up with another organization to provide a very interesting tool for our frontline like ASHA, Aganwadi. They are trained on how to monitor child development, so that there are no development difficulties especially when you can identify the development difficulties at the early stage you can actually help them overcome. But if you don’t identify at the early stage, at the later stage it will become harmful in terms of disability, in terms of learning difficulties. So it is a very scientific project, in the sign of early childhood that we are trying to translate to more basically usable practices to the communities through the front liners,” he asserted.