Creches served more children in 2015-16, but achieved limited outcome

Lack of educated workers, less focus on quality of services and lack of resources are among the primary reasons for limited outcomes, the study found

More children in India than a decade ago received one or more services under the Integrated Children Development Services (ICDS), the world’s largest integrated early childhood programme to reduce child mortality by giving supplementary nutrition, especially to malnourished children, and improve early learning outcomes.

However, the programme failed to achieve desired outcomes like changing feeding behavior of a family and improving the quality of preschool education, according to this December 2017 evaluation paper of the programme by Nirmala Rao, professor at Hong Kong University and V Kaul of Centre For Early Childhood