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Context: National Education Policy, 2020, envisions universalizing Early Childhood Care and Education through Anganwadis. However, the events linked to COVID-19 led to an abrupt halt in the progress.
What are Anganwadi Centres (AWCs)?
AWCs fall under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme. Preschool is one of the six services provided in this package. AWCs are expected to provide education through low-cost, locally sourced material that caters to the sociocultural context of mothers and children below six years.
Have these been effective?
Evidence on AWCs and private pre-schools indicate that neither model provides appropriate inputs for the holistic development of young children. An all-India survey of young children by ASER in 2019 found that not even half of the enrolled children between the ages of four and eight could perform age-appropriate cognitive tasks.
The cause of the learning crisis in Anganwadis lies in the fact that they are under-resourced and overburdened. A report on the ICDS by the Ministry of Women and Child Development identifies the absence of adequate space, lack of play-based learning materials, low investments, constraints of human resource, and uneven implementation of schemes across states.
The pandemic has further exacerbated this. In Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, Odisha, Aganwadi workers visited homes to conduct activities with children, but these were not uniform and also placed a huge burden on workers.
How to improve the model?
The potential of Aganwadi is enormous. It is crucial to leverage their vast reach by filling implementation and infrastructural gaps. Such as, increasing the honorarium of Aganwadi workers, build capacity, investing in research and development of a meaningful ECE curriculum.
Source: This post is created based on the article “A model struggling to deliver” published on 13/April/2022 in The Hindu.
