A joint meeting between the departments of social welfare, Health and the education to discuss on collaboration for implementation of the Meghalaya Early Childhood Development Mission (MECDM) in the state.
The meeting was chaired by social welfare minister Paul Lyngdoh and education minister Rakkam A Sangma at the Secretariat.
Speaking to reporters, Paul Lyngdoh said, “We have come up with a draft of the guidelines to enable the departments to work on a mode which will allow collaboration.”
He said there are a lot of challenges and shortcomings. Therefore, we need to integrate the effort of these departments.
Lyngdoh said during the meeting, a presentation was made by the principal secretary in-charge of social welfare on how the two departments can successfully implement the mission by making joint efforts.
“The challenges include the fact that we have a large number of villages which we call uncovered villages which are yet to be covered. About 1,500 such villages are uncovered villages by the social welfare department,” he said.
He said that “In the next one year we will be in a position to construct 600 more such centers.”
He informed, “On the part of the education department they have a problem whereby you know in the anganwadi centres for instance…once we introduce the ECD mission then we will be introducing the use of teaching kits for the youngsters. So the question of space, the question of where whenever the social welfare department doesn’t have centers which are readymade we can make use of school buildings which are in existence.”
“We have tasked the departments to come up with a roadmap and also a convergence mode on how we structure a workable action plan so as to facilitate these departments working in tandem to ensure the success of the mission,” Lyngdoh added.