The Government of West Bengal will use this week-long campaign as an opportunity to highlight and further enhance the community-led and community-based initiatives to educate mothers and caregivers on nutrition issues, with special focus on the economically backward and marginalized communities.

“Nutrition is an issue of survival, health and development for current and succeeding generations. Children born underweight may have impaired immune function, increased risk of diseases, low learning abilities due to impaired cognitive ability, thus affecting their school performance and then productivity in their later life," said Shashi Panja, Minister of State for Women & Child Welfare and Social Welfare. 

"We are carrying out a series of convergent and well-coordinated activities in different sectors in a mission mode to address the issues which may lead to under-nutrition, especially in the socially and economically backward communities. It is an opportunity for all of us to renew our commitment for eliminating issues of under nutrition from our state and ensure a healthy start for every child,” Panja added.
 
The Department of Women and Child Development and Social Welfare, Government of West Bengal will mobilized their state wide network of ICDS centres and frontline functionaries to reach out to the maximum number of people at the community level.

The campaign will have community level nutrition and health promotion camps, mothers’ meetings/ community sensitization sessions, cooking demonstration and recipe competition, quiz shows, healthy baby and healthy mother contest, panel discussion, public announcements, tableau.

“The Government of West Bengal has been giving adequate attention to issues related to under-nutrition especially in marginalized communities and UNICEF is happy to join in this campaign to ensure that the nutrition messages are disseminated more widely and more effectively and we are able reach out to the last household so that no child or mother is left out of this opportunity,” said M. Asadur Rahman, Chief, UNICEF Kolkata.

(Reporting by Adit Majumder)