Malnutrition has been a silent emergency in India. India has the most malnourished children in the world. As per the Global Nutrition Report 2020, 37.9% of children under 5 years are stunted and 20.8% are wasted in India, compared to the Asia average of 22.7% and 9.4% respectively. Malnutrition in India has become a situation that haunts the lives of millions of children. Among the 472 million children (2011 census), a whopping 97 million are anaemic and undernourished. NFHS Data- IV reveals that 40 out of 1000 infants don’t get to celebrate their first birthday. In March 2018, the Government of India launched its flagship programme called Poshan Abhiyan or National Nutrition Mission to improve nutritional outcomes for children, pregnant women and lactating mothers. Under this, every September is observed as Poshan Maah or National Nutrition Month.

Amidst these extremely challenging times of COVID wherein children are further exposed to multi-layered vulnerabilities, it becomes more important to address the issues related to malnutrition.   This year to mark Poshan Maah and launch a grassroot level awareness Campaign to tackle malnutrition amongst children, Caritas India organised a 2-day capacity building training on the topic “Ensuring Safe Motherhood and New-born Care amidst COVID”  for Roshni Suposhan Partners and the Community Health Volunteers from Roshni Suposhan Villages in Bihar.  The Training was conducted by technical experts from UNICEF Bihar – Dr.Sandip Ghosh and Dr.Shivani Dhar.

The sessions conducted by Dr.Sandip focussed on the Basics of Antenatal Care, Post Natal care and Maternal nutrition during pregnancy and the government schemes that provide benefits and entitlements for child and maternal health. Dr.Sandip extensively dealt with ante-natal check-up , complimentary needs during pregnancy, anaemia and pregnancy care, causes of maternal mortality as well as the importance of nutritional diet during Pregnancy. The extensive discussion of available health and nutrition-related schemes and services such as Village Health and Sanitation Day (VHSND) ,  Janani Suraksha Yojana, ICDS services etc immensely helped to generate awareness amongst the Community Health Volunteers as well as CBO members.

Dr.Shivani Dhar covered major components of New Born Care, Breastfeeding, Immunization Child Nutrition and low-cost food diversity for children as well as pregnant and lactating mothers. She extensively delivered her sessions around the first 1000 days approach essential for child development. During her session on “Tackling Malnutrition amidst Pandemic through Low-cost food diversity”, she focussed on various essential practices to ensure nutrition such as breastfeeding, complementary feeding as per age, food diversity as well as complementary feeding of a malnourished child.

The sessions by both the Resource persons also focused around breaking several myths around COVID and various precautions to be taken to ensure safe motherhood and newborn care amidst COVID. This training was a beginning of the month-long awareness sessions empowering CBO members from Musahar Community and further generate awareness at the grassroot level across Roshni Suposhan villages in Bihar during this Poshan Maah,2020. As India dreams to progress and achieve its targets reiterated during the World Health Assembly in 2012 under global nutrition targets and also its commitments under the SDGs, it remains of prime importance to not let the pandemic undo the progress achieved so far for our mothers & children and thus take pro-active steps to leave no one behind.