(GIST OF KURUKSHETRA) Nari Shakti : From Foundations to Employment

[March-2022]

India has a double advantage of women and youth power. India is among the top nations with the youngest population in the world today at a median age of 28-29 years. At present, 55.8 percent of the Indian population is in the working age group of 20-59 years- nearly half of them are women.
The World Bank reports that India’s GDP growth rate would climb above 9 percent if women had an equitable share of jobs, and that India could boost its growth by 1.5 percentage points per year if just 50 percent of women could join the workforce.

A. Early Childhood Development

The National Education Policy 2020 highlights that over 85 percent of a child’s cumulative brain development occurs prior to the age of 6 years.
Similar research studies inform that actually over 80 percent of a child’s cumulative brain development happens by the age of 3 years. This indicates the critical importance of appropriate
care, nutrition and stimulation of the brain in the early years in order to ensure healthy brain development and growth.
In fact the pre-natal stage plays an extremely critical role in the fetal brain development. In this context, the Finance Minister’s emphasis on PM POSHAN 2.0 is a welcome step in addressing long-standing issues of pre-natal and early childhood development and supporting mothers.

Mission POSHAN 2.0 is an Integrated Nutrition Support Programme. It seeks to address the challenges of malnutrition in children, adolescent girls, pregnant women and lactating mothers through a strategic shift in nutrition content and delivery and by creation of a convergent ecosystem to develop and promote practices that nurture health, wellness and immunity1. The focus area of the mission is on maternal nutrition, infant and young child feeding norms, treatment of MAM/SAM and Wellness through AYUSH. It uses a two-pronged strategy to ensure that the objectives of the focus areas are met.
First, it plans to initiate a massive awareness campaign through the POSHAN Abhiyan. The Abhiyan will be the key pillar for outreach and will cover innovations related to nutritional support, ICT interventions, media advocacy and research, community outreach and Jan Andolan.
Second, the mission is leveraging technology to continuously track the progress and bring transparency and accountability in the delivery mechanism. “Poshan Tracker” was rolled out by MoWCD on 1st March 2021 which is being leveraged for

(i) dynamic identification of stunting, wasting, under-weight prevalence among children;

(ii) last mile tracking of nutrition service delivery.

C. Ensuring Last Mile Delivery of High-Quality School Education:

The National Education Policy 2020 is one of its first kind of document which has
humbly accepted that there is a learning crisis in the country even before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
A large proportion of students currently in elementary school - estimated to be over 5 crore in number - have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy, i.e., the ability to read and comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction with Indian numerals.
The situation has further exacerbated because of the disruptions caused by the pandemic induced school closures across the country.

The Indian employment ecosystem is facing a paradoxical situation - there are thousands of people who are seeking jobs and at the same time firms find it hard to find the right talent for jobs.
The issue of employability is a serious problem which requires a systemic approach to overcome it. In the recent years the efforts taken by the Government of India have shown very promising results in creating a pool of skilled and employable labour force. The employability in India has increased from 37.22 percent in 2015 to 45.9 percent in 2021.
However, the lack of exposure to vocational education and hands-on experience in schools and colleges has been flagged as a major roadblock in creating an employable talent pool in India, The National Education Policy 2020 has set up an ambitious target to expose 50 percent of the learners in school and higher education to vocational education by 2025, while it also aims to start coding classes for students starting at class 6 for future job readiness.

A visionary initiative, however exceptional, is still the first step of a long journey. Unlike the physical infrastructure, social transformation is slower, amorphous and therefore less amenable to concrete measurements. It is for this reason that such transformation calls for the sustained efforts of not merely the whole of government, but all the stakeholders including civil society.
The active and concerted efforts of all the stakeholders can help ensure effective implementation, real and timely feedback to inform further iterations in sync with the ground realities. India could, then, truly leverage the newly resurgent Nari and Yuva Shakti to enter the Amrit Kaal, as it steps on the threshold of its centenary. The Budget 2022 shows the way.