The move assumes significance as the government has not been able to provide buildings for at least 21,000 of the total 41,484 anganwadis spread across Gujarat.

The proposal mooted by the State Women and Child Development department has already been endorsed by the GSRTC. It has agreed to part with its old buses and has forwarded the idea to the State Transport department.

Confirming this, Principal Secretary (Transport) H K Dash told Newsline: “There is an acute shortage of government buildings to house a large number of anganwadis. Currently, these anganwadis are being run in the rented premises.”

Dash said around 57 per cent of the 7,600 state transport buses have completed their road life and are fit to be scrapped. "As these buses will hardly fetch any revenue to the GSRTC, it was proposed to turn them into mobile anganwadis to serve mainly the rural areas,'' he said.

Anganwadis apart, other old ST buses may also be suitably modified into mobile restaurants and libraries and introduced in semi-urban and rural areas. The government may rope in local service organisations or public trusts to run these mobile restaurants and libraries, said Dash.

GSRTC Managing Director G R Aloria said the corporation was ready to provide its old buses to the government for this purpose. It will help the Women and Child Development department in not only overcoming the difficulty of running a large number of anganwadis from rented houses, but also in providing better healthcare, counselling and education service to poor children and women in rural as well as semi-urban areas in the state.

Meanwhile, the government has decided to strengthen the Centre-sponsored integrated child development services (ICDS) scheme in urban as well as rural areas. For this, it has introduced 10 mobile anganwadi centers – including one each in Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Vadodara, Surat, Valsad and Navsari – to help mainly tribal migrants and sugarcane filed workers.