Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme in India: A Review

ICDS is a centrally sponsored flagship scheme for holistic development of children.Indian children have underprivileged childhoods starting from birth. The infant mortality rate of Indian children is 44 and the under-five mortality rate is 93 and 25% of newborn children are underweight among other nutritional, immunization and educational deficiencies of children in India (UNICEF, 2011). India is lagging behind the other developing countries of the world in this respect. Given such a daunting challenge, ICDS was first launched in 1975 in accordance to the National Policy for Children in India (Kapil, 2002).It is implemented through the concerned States/UTs with the funding by the Government in the ratio of 50:50 for supplementary nutrition (90:10 in NER) and 90:10 for other operational components between the Centre and the States. The Scheme provides a variety of services for the development of child and women such as immunization, supplementary nutrition, health check-up, referral services, pre-school non-formal education and nutrition and health information. ICDS today is the world’s largest community based outreach program for early child development, reaching out to over 9.65 crore beneficiaries of which 7.82 crore is children under 6 and 1.83 crore is lactating mothers. The objective of this paper is to highlight the working of ICDS and the need of convergence of services under ICDS with schemes of other departments