What determines whether a child learns well? Curriculum, instruction, and assessments matter, but they operate alongside factors that sit outside the classroom—nutrition, physical well-being, and the basic ability to sustain attention through the school day. As Vidya Samiksha Kendras deepen data and monitoring capabilities within school education, a relevant question is emerging: Can this institutional architecture also support the implementation of health programmes that rely on schools as delivery points?

This question is central to the Anemia Mukt Bharat (AMB) Mission, which relies on schools to administer Iron and Folic Acid (IFA) supplementation, National Deworming Day (NDD) doses, and ongoing nutrition awareness initiatives. These interventions are straightforward in design, but delivering them at scale—across more than a million schools and multiple administrative layers—requires timely implementation, reliable data, and coordinated governance.

Operational challenges often interrupt this flow. In many regions, IFA supplies arrive on schedule but recording distribution depends on paper registers that move slowly across administrative tiers. Deworming coverage is tallied at the end of the school day, leaving little opportunity to plan follow-ups for absent children. Nutrition awareness sessions are conducted, but participation data may take weeks to consolidate, limiting visibility into actual reach. Stock shortages, once identified, often reflect issues that occurred several weeks earlier. These delays are not failures of program design, they are gaps in information movement.

It is in this context that the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) is beginning to extend its role. Originally developed as a real-time analytics and governance unit for school education, VSKs in Gujarat and Uttarakhand are now being leveraged to support selected health interventions delivered through schools. This evolution does not introduce new schemes; it brings the health department onto a shared data environment, enabling more reliable monitoring of routine processes.

In Gujarat, the Attendance Bot on SwiftChat—used daily for student and teacher attendance—now also records IFA and deworming distribution within the same workflow. These entries feed directly into the VSK dashboard, creating an up-to-date, school-level view of coverage. Absenteeism during distribution, missed rounds, and early indications of stock depletion become visible much earlier. Follow-up planning, which previously depended on monthly compilations, can now draw on current information.

Uttarakhand VSK provides a similar model. Through its Field Monitoring Bot, visiting officers log observations directly from schools—stock positions, distribution gaps, or delays in supply. The real-time data available at VSK creates a continuous stream of operational data rather than intermittent inspection summaries. Issues that might previously have surfaced only at the end of a reporting cycle now appear early enough for corrective actions within the same distribution window.

These developments point to an emerging approach in which the Vidya Samiksha Kendra functions as a cross-department governance tool, allowing Health and Education departments to operate from a shared and reliable information base. Schools serve as consistent delivery points for both learning and well-being, and the routine processes under the health programme receive the kind of timely, structured monitoring that has been applied to educational interventions under Vidya Samiksha Kendra.