Addressing a gathering at the Dissemination Seminar for Multi Indicator Cluster Studies (MICS) organised jointly by the UNICEF, BMC and the Vadodara Municipal Corporation on Tuesday, Kotecha presented his findings regarding various indicators related to health, nutrition, sanitation and education in the city's slums. ``Looking into the various areas, one found that while vaccination has shown a considerably good response with the exception of a small area like measles, the city's slums show a startlingly high rate of malnutrition. However, the good news is that only a slight gap has been found between the malnourished man and woman,'' he said

.According to Kotecha, the educational enrollment in the city was substantially better (95 per cent) with only 2 per cent drop out rate being recorded. ``While the drop out rate is not desirable, it is considerably lower than other urban areas in the state,'' he said. Kotecha added that the past three year's findings on infant mortality had shown only 40 deaths out of every 1000 cases ``which is an encouraging sign.''

Speaking on the occasion, United Way Director Girdhar Vaswani observed that a combined effort by all community members was essential for fulfilling the state's plan of action for slum areas. ``This is not only the government or the corporation's job. The community as a whole, including the beneficiaries themselves, must forward active and financial contribution to the efforts,'' he stressed.

A general consensus arrived at by the participants was that a fault-finding approach had to be adopted to achieve whatever had been targeted by the existing programme instead of formulating a new strategy all over again.