New Delhi, Jun 27 (PTI) A group of activists said the government's decision to universalise access to nutrition through linking beneficiaries' Aadhaar numbers to the Poshan Tracker digital platform will make the process more difficult and lead to another form of exclusion.

In a letter to the Secretary of the Women and Child Development last week, they said the services of ICDS must be accessible to the target groups without any mandatory requirements such as residence proof, Aadhaar, etc.

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The letter was sent by the Right to Food campaign, which includes Jean Dreze, Biraj Patnaik, Dipa Sinha, Aruna Roy, Gangaram Paikra, Kavita Srivastava, Anjali Bhardwaj, Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh, Annie Raja and Koninika Ray.

To ensure that children, especially of migrants shifting from one state to another, are not left bereft of benefits of take home ration from Anganwadi centres, a senior official said the Centre has asked states to connect the beneficiaries through its digital malnutrition measuring tool Poshan tracker to universalise nutrition access.

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Explaining the utility of the proposal, the senior WCD official further said that it was often seen that when children of migrants move from one state to another with their parents they often lose out on the Anganwadi benefits that were provided to them in the previous state.

The activists, however, claimed the move can lead to another form of exclusion due to Aadhaar linking and digitalisation-related problems.

They said the beneficiaries under the Anganwadi scheme are children under six years of age and pregnant and lactating women and supplementary nutrition for these target groups, as well as all other services of the ICDS including preschool education, nutrition and health counselling and growth monitoring, are universal services without any eligibility requirement.

"The services of ICDS must be accessible to the target groups without any mandatory requirements like residence proof, Aadhaar etc. Just the mere presence of a young child or a pregnant/lactating woman at an Anganwadi centre is enough for them to be given supplementary nutrition. However, in practice, this is not how it works. Only those who are registered beneficiaries are provided services, and only 'usual residents' are registered,” they said in the letter.

“Bringing an Aadhaar into the ICDS would be a violation of children's rights,” they said.

Given the high levels of malnutrition in the country, access to meals through the Anganwadi centres is critical for many and this is especially so for those belonging to families that are poor and marginal communities, including migrant labourers, the Right to Food campaign said.

"What is required is to remove all barriers for all children towards accessing these services by simplifying identity and residence documentation requirements. Rather, what this move seems to be doing is to only make it even more difficult for children to access these services,” it added.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)