This document discusses early childhood care and education (ECCE) in Odisha, India. It outlines the key government programs that provide ECCE, including the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme, which operates over 71,000 centers across Odisha. The document also discusses the curriculum used in ECCE centers, quality standards for ECCE, roles of NGOs, capacity building for ECCE personnel, and challenges facing ECCE in Odisha such as inadequate funding, shortages of staff and materials, and lack of coordination among programs. Suggestions to strengthen ECCE include increasing funding, improving infrastructure, hiring more staff, enhancing supervision and coordination among child development initiatives.

1. Early Childhood Care and
Education (ECCE) in Odisha
Dr. Sudarshan Mishra
Department of Education
Ravenshaw University, Cuttack
Email: smishra@ravenshawuniversity.ac.in

2. Content
• Early Childhood Care and Education
• Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme
• Role of Government and Non-government Organization in
organizing ECE
• Capacity building of personnel in ECCE
• Problems and issues in ECCE

3. Early Childhood Care and Education
• Children in the age group 0-6 years constitute around
158 million of the population of India (2011 census).
• Article-45: The State shall endeavour to provide early
childhood care and education for all children until
they complete the age of six years
• The NPE - 1986 emphasised the importance of pre-
primary education and termed it in broader
perspective as Early Childhood Care and Education
(ECCE).

4. • According to NPE - 86, ECCE and pre-primary
education should be integrated fully to
strengthen primary education in particular
and develop human resources in general.
• SSA says, ECCE is a feeder and support
programme for primary education.

5. Quality Dimensions of ECCE
• NCF-2005 has identified six basic dimensions
of quality to be addressed namely :
(i)Development of appropriate curriculum
(ii) Trained and adequately rewarded teachers ,
(iii) Appropriate teacher child ratio ,
(iv) Infrastructure support of children‘s need and
(v) Encouraging supervision and monitoring and
(vi) Improvement in learning level .

6. Curriculum
• OPEPA, Department of School and Mass Education
and Department of Women and Child Development,
Govt.of Odisha, jointly developed ANUNIMA the
curriculum for the age group of 3 to 6 years based on
developmental stages of children.
• Both ECCE centres and AWCs are to follow ARUNIMA
as their curriculum.
• This curriculum is for 120 school working days in a
year.
• The contents covers five broad areas: linguistic,
physical, mental, social and skill development.

7. Integrated Child Development
Services (ICDS) scheme
• world's largest integrated early childhood
programme
• Odisha has around 71,000 sanctioned centres
• 60,918 Anganwadi Centres and 10,216 Mini
Anganwadi Centres.

8. Major objectives of ICDS
• Improve nutritional and health status of 0-6
years children.
• Lay the foundation for proper psychological,
physical and social development of the child.
• Reduce the incidence of mortality, morbidity a
malnutrition.
• Enhance the capability of the mother/care
giver to look after the normal health and
nutritional needs of the child through proper
nutrition and health education.

9. ICDS Services
• Supplementary Nutrition
• Immunization
• Health Checkup
• Referral Services
• Pre-School Education
• Nutrition & Health Education

10. • ICDS was universalised in the year 2002.
• After the universalisation of ICDS, 326 ICDS
projects are working in all the 314 blocks of 30
districts and in 12 urban areas of Orissa.

11. ICDS beneficiaries
• Expectant and Nursing mothers
• Children less than 3 Years of age
• Children between 3 and 6 Years of age
• Adolescent Girls between 11-18 years and
other women 15-45 Years Age

12. Management
• The District Collector: heads the ICDS Co-
ordination Committee which should meet
every month to discuss issues related to ICDS.
• Sub-Collectors are the Chairpersons of ICDS
who provide support and guidance through
reviews.
• At the village level, ward members, Jaanch
Committee and Mothers Committee are
involved in implementation and monitoring of
the various activities.

13. ICDS TEAM
• comprises the Anganwadi Workers, Anganwadi
Helpers, Supervisors, Child Development Project
Officers (CDPOs) and District Programme Officers
(DPOs).
• Anganwadi Worker, a lady selected from the local
community
• Besides, the medical officers, Auxiliary Nurse
Midwife (ANM) and Accredited Social Health Activist
(ASHA) form a team with the ICDS functionaries to
achieve convergence of different services.

14. Features of ICDS Programme
(Source: The Primary Teacher : July, Oct 2008 and Jan
2009 )

15. Pre-school Education
• children aged 3-6 years come under the ambit of pre-
school education.
• aims at universalization and qualitative improvement
of primary education, by providing the child with the
necessary preparation for primary school, especially
in remote and socio-economically backward areas.
• different activities are organized at Anganwadi
Centre, relating to physical, cognitive, social,
emotional, creative development of children
• facilitated by the Anganwadi Worker.

16. Role of Non-government Organizations
Cooperation with Development Partners
• Several international agencies/development partners
including UNICEF provide technical assistance to ICDS
programme both at the central and State level.
• GoI-UNICEF Programme of Cooperation
• DFID (Department for International Development,
Govt. of United Kingdom):
• WFP (World Food Programme):
• CARE India

17. Capacity building of ECCE personnel
• OPEPA, ICDS, SCERT, UNICEF, are joining hands over
training and strengthening the overall development
of ECCE.
• The training manual has been developed by
OPEPA/SCERT, with help of experts from the areas
and from different institutes
• Manual is full of suggestive activities for transaction
of the curriculum.
• a total of 300 RPs per district have been listed.
• The training duration has been 6 days both for RPs
and ECCE Instructors/AWC workers conducted
separately.

18. • The AWC workers have to complete 30 days
training in a year.
• The monthly visit by experts and field
functionaries to ECCE is undertaken for follow
up action and to get a feed back and on the
spot guidance to ECCE Instructors/ AWC
workers.

19. modules/ Guidelines include
• (a) Teachers Training Module on Gender
Sensitization,
• (b) cluster Co-ordinator Training Module and
• (c) job chart of Cluster Co-ordinator and ECCE
Instructors and month wise suggestive list of
play materials for ECCE.
To improve other quality aspects of ECCE, the
monitoring formats for model cluster school
(MCS) Co-ordinators and ECCE Instructors
have been developed and used.

20. Problems and issues
• pre-school education is not given priority
• Budget allocation is inadequate
• shortage of personnel. Anganwadi workers (AWW)
are over burdened
• shortage of equipments/study materials/play kits
• lack of supervision and monitoring
• lack of motivation of AWWs
• lack of coordination among the functionaries of ICDS
• medium of instruction at times not mother tongue

21. Suggestions to strengthen ECCE
• pre-school education should come under
fundamental right
• Along with nutrition, health and
immunisation, ICDS should give more priority
to pre-school education.
• Budget allocation should be enhanced
• good school building
• adequate play kit and other materials
• sufficient number of personnel should be
appointed.

22. • need of regular supervision and monitoring of
pre-school education
• enhance salary and perks
• provide community support
• proper coordination among the functionaries
of ICDS
• Education of parents
• education tribal language/mother tongue

23. • All schemes and programmes related to child
development and education, like the Mahila
Samakhya, ICDS, Mid-day- Meal scheme,
school Health Programme, and Non-formal
education should come under one umbrella
with coordinated Planning and
implementation. This will lead to integrated
development of children with optimal
utilisation of resources

24. Thank you