Jammu: keeping pace with National Education Policy 2020 and its impetus on universalisation of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), Mission Directorate Integrated Child Development Scheme, Jammu and Kashmir today launched curriculum ‘Nanhe Kadam’.
The initiative, a part of ongoing Poshan Pakhwada, was formally launched by Chief Secretary, Dr Arun Kumar Mehta.
“The launched curriculum pays special attention to development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills besides principles of early learning while maintaining balance between child initiated and teacher led activities, individual and group activities, structured and free play activities.”
The programme also included launch of end-to-end digitized e-service for Ladli Beti scheme designed and developed by NIC, a single window platform for submission and tracking of application with no human intervention.
This service enables the applicant to apply, check and track the status of the application which will be forwarded online by the stakeholders to the next level. Also, the sanctioned applications and letters digitally signed will be forwarded to banks online.
On the occasion, UNiLearn, an e- learning programme, was also inaugurated which is a certificate course of 21 modules developed by UNICEF in collaboration with JKASW and Edu-Weav for training of Anganwadi workers on ECCE.
The Chief Secretary, while appreciating the initiative, said that investing in the early years of the children is one of the most effective and efficient investments a country can make to eliminate extreme poverty, boost shared prosperity and create human capital needed for economies to diversify and grow. Thus, Nanhe Kadam will act as a bridge between a child’s home life and her entry into the school.
He emphasized the role of Anganwadi Centres as nurturing hubs for health, nutrition, early learning, responsive care, security and safety of children, catering to holistic growth and development of the children. He said that making our villages and cities malnutrition free and anaemia free should be on mission mode along with saturation in aadhar seeding of children on Poshan tracker. He focused on enhancing the visibility of Anganwadi Centres as they are the first village post. He appreciated ICDS for progressing on e-learning in the ECCE curriculum.
The Chief Secretary said that the Jammu and Kashmir government is making every effort to eradicate malnutrition from the UT. He underlined the need for healthy growth of body and brain in early years of childhood and suggested that the Social Welfare Department set a goal for the next six months to identify all potential malnutrition cases to take pre-emptive efforts for prevention.
Commissioner Secretary, Social Welfare, Sheetal Nanda, elaborated on the ECCE curriculum developed with support from UNICEF, commencing in all Anganwadi centres of UT of J&K from today. She said that it is a play based activity based and inquiry-based curriculum which advocates the overall aim of ‘ECCE to focus on attaining optimal outcomes in the essential development domains and development of communication and early language, literacy, and numeracy which will build upon foundation required for child’s school readiness.
Mission Director ICDS, Rubina Kousar presented the first Annual Report 2021-22, of ICDS J&K pertaining to documentation of programmes organised, dissemination of knowledge and awareness created in the community at large by ICDS. She further actualised the launching of Nanhe kadam since the first six years of a child’s life are very important as 85-90% of the human brain development takes place in this period.
Paying tributes to anganwari workers and helpers who lost their lives while fighting against Covid, she emphasized the role of Anganwadi workers in implementation of ECCE wherein they have to create a conducive learning environment for children. They are also expected to set up the physical space, organise appropriate materials in sufficient quantity to be able to transact the curriculum, she added.
Under ECCE curriculum, a series of three books based on goals of ECCE envisaged in NEP 2020 and NIPUN Bharat guidelines is being released. It aims to provide rich learning experiences to children in different domains of development including language, physical, cognitive and socio-emotional.
It was informed that 63 ICDS functionaries have been successfully trained under UNICEF project entitled “Systematic support to education & ICDS department: for ECCE in light of the NEP-2020”.
Director General, Women and Child Development, Mir Tariq Ali, Director School Education Jammu, Director Finance, Director Planning, Joint Director School Education Jammu, Joint Director ICDS, District Programme Officers, Deputy Director ICDS, Child Development Project officers, Supervisors and Anganwadi workers of Jammu division along with ASHAS attended the event.
The field functionaries including District Programme Officers, Child development Project officers and Anganwadi workers of ICDS were felicitated with District Reasi nominated as the best performing district in the ICDS parameters of Poshan Abhiyan, poshan tracker, PMMVY and Aadhar enrolment.
