The union territory of Chandigarh has been awarded with four national level awards by the Union Ministry of Women & Child Development for exemplary performance and successful rollout of the POSHAN Abhiyaan.
POSHAN Abhiyaan, the country’s flagship programme was launched to reduce stunting, under nutrition, anemia, low birth weight and to intensify awareness on the importance of nutrition for good health.
The Union Ministry had organized the incentive based awards ceremony at New Delhi on Friday.
Chandigarh has bagged first position in ICDS-CAS implementation and is given incentive award of Rs one crore. An incentive award of Rs 1.5 crore and first position is also bagged by the city in overall excellence in programme implementation, said an official spokesman.
The spokesman said that field level leadership awards (national level) were also bagged by the city for best block level leadership.
At the block level, Usha Kiran, CDPO, Parminder Kaur, BDPO and Dr Ashok Kumar, medical officer were honoured with certificates and medals. Supervisor Parvinder Kaur, AWW Jyoti Sharma, ANM Parwati Joshi, AWH Sandhya Devi were each honoured with Rs 2.5 lakh reward.
The spokesman said that the awareness programmes on all the themes prescribed under POSHAN Abhiyaan were conducted throughout Chandigarh. Last year, POSHAN Maah was celebrated and later, POSHAN Pakhwada was celebrated.
More than 25000 activities were conducted with participation of more than 10 lakhs persons during POSHAN Maah and more than 5 lakhs in POSHAN Pakhwada which resulted in proper education and
awareness about
good nutrition and health to the targeted beneficiaries in Chandigarh, the spokesman said.
The aim of this program is to reach every household with the message of good nutrition so as to reduce malnutrition, stunting, wasting,
Anaemia by ensuring regular Antenatal and Postnatal checkups, the spokesman
added.
Last year also, Chandigarh was given the status of “Best UT in the country" and was honoured with eight awards by the Union Ministry.
The spokesman further said that Chandigarh has been the first union territory in the country to implement real time monitoring of data of beneficiaries of all Anganwadi Centres here. ICDS-Common Application Software (CAS) has been implemented for this monitoring in all the Anganwadi Centres. Growth Monitoring Devices i.e. Infantometer, Stadiometer, Infant Weighing Scales and Adult Weighing Scales have been procured to monitor height and weight of all the beneficiaries at the Anganwadi Centres.
For real time entries of the data, 496 smart phones have been procured and
distributed to all the Anganwadi workers, lady supervisors and block level help desk in the city.