About 800 top Delhi government officials will inspect around 1,600 anganwadi centres in the Capital on Saturday.
The decision was taken in the wake of complaints about the “insensitive attitude” of workers at the mother and childcare facilities, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said on Tuesday.
Addressing a press conference here, Mr. Sisodia said he had carried out inspections of many anganwadi centres in the last few weeks and found that though many centres were well-run, many were not.
Doubts raised
“Each centre has about 20 to 25 children and about 15 to 20 pregnant women registered with it, but do the children in the list actually attend and do the women get nutritious food,” asked Mr. Sisodia.
In order to check how the centres were functioning, Mr. Sisodia said all IAS, DANICS and ad-hoc DANICS officials would inspect two centres each on Saturday. He said the government would see how the drive went before devising a programme to cover all the around 10,000 anganwadi centres in Delhi.
Reacting to the news, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted: “This is a huge exercise to overhaul anganwadi system [sic].”
In a letter to Chief Secretary M.M. Kutty on Monday, Mr. Sisodia had said that the officials should be asked to prepare their reports as per a format given by the Women and Child Development Department.
Surprise visits
He added that the officials should be asked to keep the visits a surprise.
He also wrote that in his recent visits to the anganwadi centres, he had found that some of the names in the list were “fictitious”. Last week, Mr. Sisodia had written an open letter to anganwadi workers asking them to pull up their socks. He had even terminated the services of six workers after finding irregularities in their work.
