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Integrated Child Developement Services

This scheme addresses a range of children’s needs under one umbrella. Health care, nutrition and pre-school education of children upto the age of six as well as nutrition of adolescent girls and pregnant and nursing women are part of this programme. The services to be provided under this scheme include supplementary nutrition, health check-up, immunization, referral services, and non formal preschool education. The ICDS centres or Anganwadi would be the centre of convergence of all the services.

Under this programme, children up to 6 years should be provided 300 calories and 8-10 grams of protein; adolescent girls 500 calories and 20-25 grams of protein per day and pregnant and nursing mothers 500 calories and 20-25 grams of protein per day. Undernourished children are entitled to double the daily supplement provided to the other children (600 calories and/or special nutrients on medical recommendation).

The ICDS is a centrally sponsored scheme with the state governments contributing towards 50% of the costs of supplementary nutrition (i.e. Rs. 1 per child per day).

ICDS Court Order Summary

  1. Every settlement in rural areas and urban slums must be covered with Anganwadi Centres.
  2. Supplementary nutrition should be provided to every child under six, every adolescent girl, every pregnant woman and nursing mother for 300 days in a year.
  3. All the services of ICDS including immunization, health education, pre-school education, and supplementary nutrition must be provided to ALL children up to the age of six years, adolescent girls, pregnant women and nursing mothers.
  4. Efforts must be made to ensure that all SC/ST habitations in the country have AWCs as early as possible. Similar efforts shall also be made to cover all urban slums.
  5. Private contractors should be banned from the supply of supplementary nutrition. Local women’s SHGs and Mahila Mandals should be encouraged to supply supplementary food distributed in Anganwadi Centres.
  6. The BPL status of a family is not a criterion for accessing the ICDS.
  7. All State Governments/Union Territories are to put on their website full data for the ICDS schemes including where AWCs are operational, the number of beneficiaries category-wise, the funds allocated and used and other related matters
  8. Communities (rural and urban) are entitled to an "anganwadi on demand" if there are more than 40 children under the age of six and there is no provision of an anganwadi centre.

Important documents related to ICDS

  1. ICDS primer
  2. FOCUS report
  3. Strategies Paper
  4. Two commissioners reports on ICDS
    1. ICDS Report (August 2007)
    2. ICDS Report (July 2006)
  5. Supreme Court orders on ICDS
  6. See the child development section in the website of the Ministry of Women and Child Development for official documents related to ICDS and also recent data on implementation of the scheme.