New Delhi (NVI): Minister for Women & Child Development Smriti Irani today said that the Government is considering amendments to Prevention of Child Marriage Act to make reporting of cases of child marriages mandatory for the agencies concerned.
This was informed by the Minister in response to a question on the prevalence of large number of cases of pregnancies among married girls under 18 years of age, at the inaugural session of Northern Regional Workshop on Best Practices and Innovations from POSHAN Abhiyaan here yesterday.
Notably, the number of cases of pregnancies in girls under 18 years is as high as 21 percent and children born from child marriages are more prone to undernourishment.
She further stated that 2.7 crore activities were undertaken by the WCD Ministry, state governments, anganwadi workers during the POSHAN Maah in September this year with 1.3 million ground level functionaries dealing with 85 million beneficiaries.
She added that Odisha was not part of POSHAN Abhiyaan in the beginning but has now come on board and West Bengal has adopted most of the elements of the programme.
Tripura which had a huge gap in implementation of the nutrition programme two years ago has now made remarkable achievements in nutrition informed, she added.
Smriti Irani reiterated that malnutrition is not restricted to women and children belonging to the poor strata of society, many children from affluent families living in urban areas are equally afflicted with malnutrition.
The Minister said that WCD Ministry, NITI Aayog and Health and Family Welfare Ministry are examining measures to strengthen the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme in order to ensure that targeted children are benefitted.
CEO NITI Aayog, Amitabh Kant, in his keynote address said that malnutrition is a big challenge and it has to be tackled successfully if India has to grow at a rate of 8-9 percent annually.
He said POSHAN Abhiyaan cannot be run merely as a government programme. It has to be made a Jan Andolan by actively engaging Panchayati Raj institutions and self-help groups.
Amitabh Kant observed that there is lack of convergence at the field level that can be addressed by capacity building, leveraging technology and real time monitoring of the schemes being implemented to tackle the problem of malnutrition.
