Editorial 1 : App for mother and child welfare
Introduction: The rollout of the Poshan Tracker by the Government of India represents the largest mobile phone nutrition monitoring system in the history of global health. This will induce data driven nutrition policy in India.
Other examples of app-based nutrition trackers around the world
- UNICEF’s RapidSMS project in Malawi or a small project in nine primary health centres by university researchers in the Republic of Mauritius.
About Poshan Tracker App
- This application provides a 360-degree view of the activities of the Anganwadi Centre (child care centers), service deliveries of Anganwadi Workers and complete beneficiary management for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under six.
- It also digitizes and automates physical registers used by workers to help improve the quality of their work.
- The Anganwadi workers are being provided smartphones procured through Government e-Market (GeM) for efficient service delivery.
- A nodal person has also been appointed for providing technical support and resolving any issue with downloading the new Poshan Tracker application and its functioning in each state.
- The sources that each migrant worker who had registered in their original state could go to the nearest Anganwadi in their current place of residence and avail of the schemes and services offered.
- It was launched by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD).
Benefits of Poshan Tracker app of India
- Central to the new Poshan 2.0 guidelines released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the Poshan Tracker is a centralised ICT-enabled platform, developed to promote transparency and accountability of nutrition service delivery to the last mile.
- As per the latest data from the Poshan Tracker Dashboard, the height and weight of 72 million children under five years of age are being collected through the Poshan Tracker. (real-time monitoring of more than 50 per cent of children in the country. Moreover, 94 per cent of beneficiaries have been Aadhar verified.)
- In addition to capturing beneficiary data, the Poshan Tracker dashboard captures national, state and district-level data on three sets of indicators.
- First, the Anganwadi infrastructure including the number of Anganwadi centres built, with functional toilets or drinking water and whether they have been open for service delivery.
- Second, tracking the number of beneficiaries who received take-home rations (not raw rations) and hot cooked meals.
- And third, monitoring of nutritional outcomes.
- The Poshan Tracker is designed to act as a real-time feedback loop for frontline functionaries to prevent malnutrition by identifying children who are faltering at an early stage, targeting beneficiaries facing acute malnutrition, and monitoring the effective delivery of ICDS services.
- The various modules available on the Poshan tracker include —
- beneficiary registration,
- daily tracking job aid module and home visit scheduler for the anganwadi worker,
- growth monitoring (height/weight) as per WHO Standards,
- migration facility for beneficiaries who move to another Anganwadi centre within or outside the state,
- a dashboard for monitoring key performance indicators of selected underperforming districts,
- and a portal for reporting community engagements on nutrition promotion.
- Further, separate modules for AWCs in tribal and border areas are also being developed.
- In terms of accuracy of data, Poshan Tracker app removes the chance of error in entering manual nutrition data.
- It takes the statistics of child and automatically concerts it into various categories.
- The Poshan Tracker makes beneficiary-wise data – that is observed on the ground, not modelled by academics – available for decision-makers for local and timely action.
- The Poshan Tracker avoids maintaining lots of registers and manual entries, enabling real-time transmission of data to local, state, and national offices.
- In addition to faster transmission of data to the government, in terms of care at the level of the AWC, it is easier to retrieve information about a given child from the Poshan Tracker app as compared to bulky paper-based registers, saving more time for nutritional promotion activities.
- in the Indian context, it is important to consider the fact that Anganwadi workers are overburdened, and extreme care must be taken to ensure that the Poshan Tracker is routinely updated based on their feedback to improve user-friendliness.
Conclusion: To fulfil the objectives outlined in Poshan 2.0 guidelines, the Poshan Tracker’s data can thus catalyse tangible and actionable outcomes at the grassroots.
Editorial 2 : A mission impossible
Introduction: The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s second trip, over the weekend, to the Middle East since the horrific Hamas terror attack on October 7 has turned out to be as unsuccessful as the first.
The objective of Blinken’s visit
- The top American diplomat sought to persuade, without much success, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be mindful of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.
US’s effort to put pressure on Israel
- At a meeting with Blinken in Jordan, several Arab foreign ministers pressed the US to prevail on Israel to bring the military offensive to a halt.
- At a joint press conference on Saturday with Blinken, the Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers vented their frustration with Israel.
- Jordan’s Ayman Safadi demanded that the US must “Stop this madness.”
- Egypt’s Sameh Shoukry called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
- But Netanyahu, who had met Blinken last Friday, has publicly rejected the call for a ceasefire.
US’s Balancing Act
- US balancing act is becoming harder between its competing objectives — support for Israel’s right to self-defense, the call to reduce civilian casualties in Israel’s Gaza military operations, and retaining the support of moderate Arab nations for a regional rearrangement.
- Blinken affirmed the US position that a ceasefire at this juncture would only help Hamas regroup and renew its attacks on Israel.
- At the same time, Blinken has been pressing Israel for “humanitarian pauses”, a position that is unacceptable to both the Arab foreign ministers and to Israel, which does not want to lose the momentum in its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
- Meanwhile, the one US diplomatic success in getting Israel and Hamas to facilitate the evacuation of foreign and dual nationals from Gaza is in danger of falling apart.
- The two sides are accusing the other of breaking the terms of the agreement.
The popular pressure on Arab states
- Moderate Arab states, who are not enamored of the radical regional agenda propounded by Hamas and its Iranian backers, are under mounting popular pressure to take a tougher stance against Israel or risk their own domestic political legitimacy.
- It is no surprise, then, that the Arab leaders are not willing to publicly engage with a major element of Blinken’s mission to the Middle East — to look at the future of Gaza after the Israeli military offensive comes to an end.
- The US is hoping to mobilize the moderate Arab states to construct a post-Hamas arrangement in Gaza.
- But none of the region’s leaders want to engage in such a discussion amidst Israel’s military offensive that is producing massive casualties.
Meanwhile, the war of attrition continues
- According to the UN, the death toll has crossed 10,00 and more than 2,000 people are missing.
- Meanwhile, Israel is losing sympathy around the world, including in the United States and the West.
- Israel’s regional adversaries, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, are taking full advantage of the war in Gaza to define the narrative and win new supporters.
Conclusion: The ceasefire has become the precondition for any meaningful regional diplomacy, but the US is unable to deliver on that count, at least for now.