Supportive Supervision Skills and Coping Strategies of ICDS Lady Supervisors : An Explorative Study

Indian population touched 1.324 billion in 2016 with a decadal growth rate of 1.2%. Children constitute 39%, where 29% are in the age group of 0-5 years. A survey on children says that 40% of children receive less food than they should, which is adversely affecting their overall development. To ensure that children attain the developmental milestone, the Government of India launched Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) program in 1975 and created Anganwadi Center (AWC) as a platform to deliver the package of services which caters to 82 million children in the age group of 0-6 years. Existing literature says that despite the efforts, more than one-third of the world's malnourished children still live in India with half of those under three years being underweight. Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) are community-based workers, with low literacy levels, varied levels of interest and social skills to deliver the packages of services at centers. Considering the AWWs' educational status and external and internal environment, the lady supervisor's role has become key to providing supportive supervision for uniformity in services delivery. However, there are factors which affect the supervision adversely, hence the quality of services provided at AWCs is compromised. The current study is exploratory in nature where convenience sampling is used to select the study sample from Bhilwara district of Rajasthan. The sample consisted of 24 members. A semistructured questionnaire was used to collect the data and information on select variables and measure the gaps in the skills of lady supervisors and how they are coping with the factors affecting supportive supervision. By organizing the key findings, the study creates an opportunity for stakeholders to develop a knowledge management system which can be further used by the lady supervisors and other ICDS functionaries to organize, store and disseminate knowledge related to lady supervisors in ICDS. This paper seeks to develop a knowledge management system after measuring the supportive supervision skills of ICDS lady supervisors and how they are coping with the factors affecting the job performance