Is ICDS Intervention in Telangana Dwindling? A Quest

India struggled with food security when the Bengal famine struck in 1942-43. Since, then many policies have been updated and introduced to tackle food security. One such was the public distribution system (PDS) in the 1960s to ensure staple foods like rice, wheat, and edible oils are always available through fair price shops. Concurrently, , pre-school children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers living below the poverty line were at high risk of malnutrition resulting from inadequate food intake and repeated episodes of infection. Also, malnutrition leading to lack of immunity was high, resulting in an increased infant mortality rate. At the beginning of 1970, a detailed review of the health and nutrition programme was undertaken by the Government of India. In India’s constitution, children were given a special place. In the year 1974, the National Board for Children was set up with the Prime Minister as its Chairman, to monitor the progress of the programme for the care and development of children. Several programmes have been established since Independence for the well-being of children. Thereafter, it was decided to develop an integrated approach to provide essential health, nutrition, and education services to pre-school children for their optimal development. A new experimental project, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), was launched in 1975, a key instrument in advancing the nutrition security agenda among the most vulnerable groups in India viz. women and children. The National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013 further strengthened the commitment towards food security. As per the ICDS project, the NFSA identifies Anganwadis as responsible for ensuring critical nutritional provisions to pregnant women, lactating mothers, and children with the primary objective to improve the nutritional and health status of children in the age group 0 to 6 years. In the above context, the paper aims to explore the efficacy of such programmes by considering the Anganwadis located in slum areas of Hyderabad and villages in Telangana. By drawing a comparison, this study looks into the efforts of the scheme’s implementation and identifies that the Anganwadis located in the urban areas perform better with respect to nutritional indicators*than those in rural areas of Telangana.