In news– As part of the 75th year of Independence of India a programme on “Nutrition Smart Village” will be initiated to strengthen the Poshan Abhiyan.
About the initiative
- It aims to reach out to 75 villages across India through the network of All India Coordinated Research Project on Women in Agriculture (AICRP-WIA).
- A total of 75 villages will be adopted by AICRP centres and ICAR-Central Institute for Women in Agriculture(ICAR-CIWA), for which the AICRP centres will adopt 5 villages each with the remaining to be adopted by ICAR-CIWA with an aim to develop 75 Nutri-Smart villages.
- The objectives of the initiative are:
- Promoting nutritional awareness.
- Education and behavioural change in rural areas involving farm women and school children.
- Harnessing traditional knowledge through the local recipe to overcome malnutrition and
- Implementing nutrition-sensitive agriculture through homestead agriculture and Nutri-garden.
- To achieve the goal of Malnutrition free villages, intensive awareness campaigns and field activities will be undertaken focusing on the concept of Nutri-village / Nutri-food / Nutri-diet/ Nutri-thali etc. for strengthening the Poshan Abhiyan.
- Awareness among the women farmers will also be created about their legal rights in all walks of life.
- The products/tools/technologies developed by AICRP centres will be evaluated through multi-location trials.
ICAR-Central Institute for Women in Agriculture (ICAR-CIWA)–
- It is an institution first of its kind in India that is exclusively devoted to gender related research in agriculture.
- It was established as National Research Centre for Women in Agriculture (NRCWA) in April 1996 at Bhubaneswar (Odisha) under Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi.
- It was set up based on the recommendation of the Working Group on Agricultural Research and Education, constituted by the Planning Commission for the formulation of the 8th Five Year Plan (1992-97).
- It was renamed as “ICAR-Central Institute for Women in Agriculture” (ICAR-CIWA) in the year 2014.
- The institute has been undertaking research on various issues affecting women’s role and participation and the emerging opportunities in agriculture.
- It focuses on participatory action research in different technology-based thematic areas involving farm women to make farm technologies suitable for them.
- It also takes up activities to catalyze and facilitate research and development institutions to bring farm women perspective in their research and development programmes.
