Also: POSHAN, Poshan Abhiyaan, National Nutrition Mission
Definition
POSHAN Abhiyaan (Prime Minister's Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nourishment), launched in March 2018, is India's flagship mission to reduce stunting, undernutrition, anaemia and low birth weight among children, adolescent girls and pregnant and lactating women through convergence, technology and community mobilisation.
Child malnutrition has been one of India's most stubborn development problems. Successive National Family Health Surveys showed that a large share of children under five were stunted (too short for their age), wasted (too thin for their height) or underweight, and that anaemia was widespread among women and children. Earlier programmes delivered food and services, but they often worked in silos: the health department, the anganwadi system, water and sanitation programmes and schools each pursued their own targets.
POSHAN Abhiyaan was designed as a mission rather than a new delivery scheme. Its central idea was convergence: bringing together the schemes that affect nutrition so that a pregnant woman or young child receives a coordinated package. It also introduced real-time monitoring through mobile phones given to anganwadi workers, incentives for performance, and a "Jan Andolan" or people's movement approach to change behaviour around feeding, hygiene and care. While the anganwadi network itself is described on the ICDS page, this page looks at POSHAN Abhiyaan as a governance and behaviour-change experiment, and at what the data say about its results.
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