Significant dip in the immunisation-UNICEF

Janjivan Bureau
New Delhi: After holding back the controversial state-wise findings of Unicef’s Rapid Survey on Children for over a month, the Women and Child Development Ministry has finally reached a consensus over the report with certain “caveats”, a senior ministry official said today.
The state-wise recommendations were held by the Ministry as it indicated a significant dip in the immunisation cover of children in certain states while it had released the national-level findings in 2014.
A committee was constituted to examine the state-wise data of the report following some objections by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme over the survey’s methodology.
The official said that the sample size of the survey was less in some states as it was not according to the population of the state.
“The consensus has been reached and the findings have been accepted with certain “pre-conditions” or “caveats” that there may be a marginal error of two or three per cent in cases where the sample size is not in proportion to the recommended ratio. It is uploaded on the Ministry’s website now,” the official said.
He said that the overall outcome of the report shows sign of improvement.
“Overall the malnutrition has been reduced to around 29.6 per cent from 42 per cent approximately. But the performance of some individual states may be week. Some state have performed better, some have not,” he said.
The survey that mainly focused on the well being of children below 6 years and their mothers, covering aspects of child development, maternal care and school attendance covered 105,483 households and 5630 Anganwadi centres (AWC) leading to more than 210,000 interviews.
For compiling nutritional status, measurement of height and weight of over 90,000 children aged 0-4 and over 28,000 adolescent girls aged 10-18 was collected across all states.