Nutrition monitoring app made available offline partially to increase reach: WCD

A nutrition monitoring app developed by the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development, has been made available offline partially so that anganwadis could record data of children in remote parts of the country.

The app named 'Integrated Child Development Services-Common Application', is being used to help draw nutrition profile of each village and aims to address the problem of malnutrition permanently. The system gets real-time reports from the grassroots level.

The application has been made available offline partially so that anganwadis could note information about child nutrition in the app from even remote parts of country where Internet connectivity is poor or unavailable, Secretary at the Women and Child Development Ministry, Rakesh Srivastava said.

The information recorded by the anganwadis would be shared with the supervisor who will then feed it into the database server. The database could be accessed by various stakeholders at every level, including the ministry officials.

By monitoring the nutrition level, the app indicates whether a child is malnourished or underweight, depending on which suitable action are taken. The app also keeps a track of pregnant or lactating mothers and depending on their status, necessary steps are initiated, Srivastava said.

It is currently available in 57 districts of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, benefiting about 1.2 lakh anganwadi centres. It is expected to spread to 14 lakh centres benefitting around 10 crore people by the end of this year.

According to WCD officials, over 10 million people have been registered in the app, out of which 9.2 million are children, while 1.2 million are pregnant or lactating woman.

The app has been developed under the Poshan Abhiyan which has been tasked with bringing down stunting of the children in the age group of 0-6 years from 38.4 per cent to 25 per cent by the year 2022. The ministry is seeking to collaborate with IT industries in improving the app.

Srivastava said it is necessary that anganwadis are able to feed information about the child and lactating woman in the app correctly as the data cannot be changed once it has been entered.

So there is a need for collaborating with the IT industry for redeveloping and improving the app, he said.