What are the roles and responsibilities of Village Health Sanitation Nutrition committees (VHSNCs) ?

 Some of the roles and responsibilities include creating awareness on community health and nutrition, conducting survey on village nutritional status and deficiencies among women and children, promoting traditional wisdom on locally available food stuffs by consulting the community, supervising the Anganwadi Centre, and organising of Village Health and Nutrition Day to monitor the programmes implemented for the village. Significantly, the VHSNC monitors the healthcare services being provided at the primary and secondary level.

By filling scorecards for facilities and services been provided at the healthcare unit and by interacting with service users (community), VHSNC can identify gaps and key issues. They also organise Jan Samvads, a forum that encourages dialogue between community and authorities wherein health related grievances would be redressed (Tuteja, 2022).

Besides, the Committee conducts in-depth analysis of the reasons for malnutrition both at the household and community levels. In a way, the Committee serves as a public forum to redress grievances related to health and nutrition. In order to reach out to all villages, the NRHM has advised state governments to constitute VHSNC and to notify it as a sub-committee of Gram Panchayat. It has also been notified under the NRHM guidelines that VHSNC would function under the leadership of the respective Gram Panchayat.

Example 1: In Karnataka, VHSNC has been serving as significant social space to create health awareness among low-income groups. A study team had observed that ever since the functioning of VHSNC there has been a significant reduction in the incidence of diarrhoea infections. Secondly, there has been an increase in number VHSNC members and their active participation. Thirdly, the community had improved their ability to interpret health information. In fact, effective VHSNC has the ability to ensure coping capacity of community with any type of communicable and non-communicable diseases (Madon, 2020).

Example 2: In Assam, there are a total of 27,673 VHSNCs catering to the health needs of the community. As per the guidelines issued by NRHM, a PRI member is the President and each VHSNC has been annually granted an untied fund of Rs. 10,000/- to mitigate the health needs of the village. Apart from receiving training about smooth functioning of VHSNC, the members have been oriented to maintain the cash registers and vouchers related to committee activity (Government of Assam website).

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