Recently, Odisha Chief Minister has launched Mukhyamantri Sampoorna Pushti Yojana. What is/are the primary objective/s of the scheme ?
(a) To promote higher education for girls.
(b) Improve maternal a

Question

Recently, Odisha Chief Minister has launched Mukhyamantri Sampoorna Pushti Yojana. What is/are the primary objective/s of the scheme ?
(a) To promote higher education for girls.
(b) Improve maternal and child nutrition in the State.
(c) To provide employment opportunities for adolescent girls.
(d) Boosting agricultural production in rural area.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), 'Only (b) is correct.' The Mukhyamantri Sampoorna Pushti Yojana was launched by the Chief Minister of Odisha on 15 September 2023, together with a companion scheme called the Pada Pushti Yojana, and its purpose is stated in its name: pushti is nutrition, and the scheme exists to meet the nutritional needs of mothers, adolescent girls and children in the state. Its components make the object unmistakable. Nutritional supplements are provided to adolescent girls in the fifteen-to-nineteen age group; additional dry ration goes to pregnant and lactating women; severely malnourished children receive a complete food supplement, and moderately malnourished and severely underweight children receive vitamin-enriched chhatua, the roasted-gram flour that is a staple of Odisha's supplementary feeding, together with eggs. The companion Pada Pushti Yojana provides hot cooked meals to children in remote and tribal hamlets, where an anganwadi centre may be far from the settlement. Statement (b) — improving maternal and child nutrition in the state — is therefore an accurate summary of the primary objective, and it is the only statement that is. Statement (a) is about higher education for girls, statement (c) about employment for adolescent girls and statement (d) about agricultural production; none of the three describes what this scheme does, and only option (2) selects (b) alone.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option makes the scheme one for promoting higher education among girls. Adolescent girls do appear in the scheme, but as recipients of nutritional supplements in the fifteen-to-nineteen age band, not as students receiving educational support. The confusion is understandable — Indian states run many girl-child schemes that combine scholarships with health benefits — but the two objects are distinct, and the name of this scheme points to nutrition. When a scheme's name contains a plain descriptive word in Hindi, Odia, Marathi or Sanskrit, translating it is often the fastest route to the answer.  (c) This option combines two objects the scheme does not have — education for girls and a boost to agricultural production. Statement (d) is the sort of general developmental aim that could be attached to almost any state programme, which is exactly why it is offered: a candidate who does not know the scheme may reason that a state scheme with a Sanskrit name is likely to be about rural welfare in some broad sense and pick a broad-sounding answer. A statement is only correct if it describes the scheme's own object, and here that object is nutrition.  (d) This option makes the scheme one for employment and for agriculture. The employment claim is the more seductive half, because adolescent girls genuinely are a target group of the scheme — but what they receive is nutritional supplementation, not work or skill training. Substituting one kind of benefit for another while keeping the beneficiary group correct is a standard way of writing a false statement about a welfare scheme, and it defeats a candidate who has registered only who the scheme is for and not what it gives them.

Concept: State nutrition schemes sit on top of a national framework and are best understood in that relation. The Integrated Child Development Services, delivered through anganwadi centres, provides supplementary nutrition, immunisation, health check-ups, referral services and pre-school education to children under six and to pregnant and lactating women; POSHAN Abhiyaan, launched in 2018 and later restructured as Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0, adds targets for reducing stunting, undernutrition, anaemia and low birth weight. Within that framework, states add schemes of their own aimed at gaps the central programme does not fully close. The Mukhyamantri Sampoorna Pushti Yojana, launched in Odisha in September 2023, is one such addition: it extends supplementary nutrition to adolescent girls aged fifteen to nineteen, gives extra dry ration to pregnant and lactating women, and provides differentiated food support to severely and moderately malnourished children, with the companion Pada Pushti Yojana taking hot cooked meals into remote and tribal hamlets. The design reflects the epidemiology the National Family Health Survey reports — that undernutrition in India is concentrated in the first thousand days of life and in adolescent girls, who become the next generation of mothers.

State PCS 2024 Q95 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q95 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer