Original Research Article
Year: 2017 | Month: July | Volume: 7 | Issue: 7 | Pages: 22-30
Utilization and Parental Perception towards Anganwadi Services in Rural Lucknow- A Cross Sectional Study
Dr. Hossain Mehedi Rehman1, Dr. S. P Patel2, Dr. Monika Agarwal2, Dr. V. K Singh3, Dr. Pooja Mahour4
1Junior Resident, 2Professor, 3Associate Professor,
Dept. of Community Medicine and Public Health, King George’s Medical University, Lucknow
4Assistant Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry, King George’s Medical University, Lucknow
Corresponding Author: Dr. Hossain Mehedi Rehman
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Integrated Child Development Services, a flagship programme of the Government of India provides health, nutrition, and pre-school education to children aged three years to six years. Even after 35 years of implementation, the success of ICDS in tackling childhood and maternal problems remains a matter of concern. As per NFHS-3, in Uttar Pradesh, only 15.2% of the children received Supplementary Nutrition while only 13.3% of children in the age group of 3-6 years utilized Pre-school education services from AWCs, which is quite low.
Objectives:
- To assess the level of utilization of services from Anganwadi centres among children aged 3-6 years in the rural areas of Lucknow.
- To assess the perception and satisfaction of parents towards services being provided at the Anganwadi Centres.
- To assess the reasons for non-utilization and parental perception towards services being provided at the Anganwadi Centres.
Methodology: A Cross-sectional study was carried out in Lucknow. From the eight rural ICDS projects, one ICDS project was randomly selected. From the selected project, five Supervisor Zones were randomly selected and from each supervisor zone one Anganwadi Centre was randomly selected. The households of all the registered children (3-6 years) were visited and parents (mother / father) were interviewed using a pre tested questionnaire to obtain the sample size of 314. Data was analysed using SPSS.16.
Results:Almost two fifths (39.5%) of the parents did not send their children to the Anganwadi centres. Majority of the parents (75.2%) perceived Supplementary Nutrition to be beneficial whereas only about one third (36.0%) perceived Pre School Education to be beneficial for their child. More than one third (36.6%) the parents said that overall services at the Anganwadi centres were of poor quality. Lack of perceived benefit of Pre-school Education (96.7%), and no teaching or proper guidance to the children at the centre (91.1%) were the major causes of children not attending the centres. Perceived benefit of Supplementary Nutrition was found to be significantly associated with caste, mother’s education and socio economic Status and perceived benefit of Pre School Education was found to be significantly associated with age of the child, religion, caste, mother’s education and socio economic Status.
Conclusion: The study found utilization of Anganwadi services to be quite low. As compared to Pre School Education more of the Parents perceived Supplementary Nutrition to be beneficial. However most of them were not satisfied and on a whole perceived the services to be of poor quality. Therefore stringent supervision to ensure provision and quality of service of the ICDS centres must be done. Moreover the functions of AWWs should not be restricted to distribution of supplementary nutrition only, but a need based approach should be developed to improve the satisfaction level of the end users.
Key words: Utilization, Parental Perception, Anganwadi services, Rural, Lucknow