India’s Anaemia Fight Expands: Low Birth Weight Infants Added to Revamped Programme

The Union government has expanded its flagship anaemia control programme to include low birth weight babies up to six months of age for the first time, as it overhauls its strategy to address one of the country’s most persistent public health challenges. The revamped Anaemia Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, to be released by Union Health Minister J P Nadda on Monday, moves beyond iron supplementation to incorporate better testing, treatment, nutrition, and digital tracking.

Anaemia remains a major public health problem in India, linked to poor pregnancy outcomes, low birth weight, and impaired child development. The revised programme replaces the existing 6x6x6 framework with a new 7x7x7 strategy, adding low birth weight babies as the seventh beneficiary group to target anaemia from the earliest stage of life.

Under the updated guidelines, a new “Eating Right” initiative encourages regular consumption of iron-rich and diversified diets. Additionally, the programme’s T3 approach—Test, Treat, and Talk—has been upgraded to T4 with the addition of “Track,” ensuring beneficiaries are monitored after diagnosis and treatment. For pregnant and lactating women with severe anaemia or those not responding to oral iron therapy, intravenous iron treatment using ferric carboxymaltose and iron sucrose has been included in national treatment protocols.

Digital tracking will be strengthened by linking haemoglobin test records of pregnant women through the JANANI portal, while records for children will be captured through the RBSK and U-WIN portals. The seventh institutional mechanism is strengthened monitoring through digital tracking.

The revised guidelines aim to improve prevention, early detection, treatment, and follow-up, leveraging technology to enhance the programme’s reach and effectiveness. The release of the operational guidelines is scheduled during the 16th meeting of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare.