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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

App to tackle hunger

-The Telegraph

New Delhi: Maneka Gandhi today unveiled a new tool to fight malnutrition - a mobile app.

In a first of its kind effort, the Union ministry for women and child development unveiled the application that would chart the nutrition status of every child under the Integrated Child Development Scheme and alert health workers through colour-coded graphs.

Apart from day-to-day tracking of each child, the app - developed in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - would help anganwadi (care) centres do away with daily files they needed to maintain on families registered with them.

What the anganwadi workers will have to do is put in all the data they collect - names and details of families registered with them; a child's height, weight and age, and details of pregnant women. The data would then be uploaded to a server which can be accessed not just by their supervisors but also the central ministry.

The application has been geared to automatically alert the workers to a child's nutritional status through colour-coded graphs.

"As soon as we put in the child's weight, it will calculate the health status of the child in relation to his or her age. So, if the child is malnourished, it will show red; if better than that, yellow;while green means the child is healthy. We can tell the parents on the spot what to do to improve their child's health," said Savita, an anganwadi worker from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.

"Now, the details of 200-250 families with us are at our fingertips," said Renu, another anganwadi worker. The app-based data system, which also works offline, will be started in eight states - Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh - and is now available in English, Hindi, Marathi and Telugu.

"The app's greatest benefit is we can identify almost in real time pockets that need urgent attention," a ministry official said. "We will know the status of each child between the 0-6 age group and treat each case according to its needs."
 
The Telegraph, 26 May, 2016, please click here to access