Maternity Benefits under PMMVY

The Government has accorded high priority to the issue of malnutrition and is implementing several schemes like Anganwadi Services, Scheme for Adolescent Girls and Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojna (PMMVY) under the Umbrella Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme as direct targeted interventions to address the problem of malnutrition among women and children in the country.

Government has set up POSHAN Abhiyaan on 18.12.2017 for a three-year time frame commencing from 2017-18. The goals of POSHAN Abhiyaan are to achieve improvement in nutritional status of Children from 0-6 years, Adolescent Girls, Pregnant Women and Lactating Mothers in a time bound manner during the three years with fixed targets as under:

The Abhiyaan aims to reduce malnutrition in the country in a phased manner, through a life cycle approach, by adopting a synergised and result oriented approach. The Abhiyaan has mechanisms for timely service delivery and a robust monitoring as well as intervention infrastructure. It targets to bring down stunting of the children in the age group of 0-6 years from 38.4% to 25% by the year 2022. The major activities undertaken under this Abhiyaan are ensuring convergence with various other programmes; Information Technology enabled Common Application Software for strengthening service delivery and interventions; Community Mobilization and Awareness Advocacy leading to Jan Andolan- to educate the people on nutritional aspects; Capacity Building of Frontline Functionaries, incentivizing States/ UTs for achieving goals etc.
The maternity benefits under Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) are available to all Pregnant Women and Lactating Mother (PW&LM), except those who are in regular employment with the Central Government or State Government or Public Sector Undertaking or those who are in receipt of similar benefits under any law for the time being in force, for first living child in all parts of the country, including Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Under PMMVY, maternity benefit of ₹ 5,000/- is provided in three installments to eligible PW&LM during the period of pregnancy and lactation. The eligible beneficiary also receives the remaining cash incentive as per approved norms towards maternity benefit under Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) after institutional delivery so that on an average, a woman gets ₹ 6,000/-.

The PMMVY is reviewed periodically through Video Conferences with States/UTs and through National and Regional level workshops for its successful implementation. The operational difficulties faced by the States/UTs in implementation of the scheme, as and when reported, are addressed through mutual/technical discussions.

Annual target cannot be fixed. However, PMMVY is expected to cover 51.70 lakhs beneficiaries per annum. The State/UT-wise the number of beneficiaries reaping the benefits of the scheme so far is given below:

This information was given by the Minister of Women and Child Development, Smriti Zubin Irani, in a written reply in the Lok Sabha today.

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