Bhubaneswar: Wipro chairman Azim Premji on Tuesday reiterated his commitment to fight malnutrition in Odisha and praised chief minister Naveen Patnaik for taking care of the hygiene of adolescent girls.

The Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives has been working on addressing the issue of malnutrition in Odisha for the last two years.

Official sources said that Premji called on chief minister Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday evening and discussed steps to expand the scheme of conditional cash transfer to cover all children.

He appreciated the efforts of the state government to reduce infant mortality rate from 65 per thousand in 2005-06 to 40 per thousand in 2015-16. He also applauded the state government for taking care of the health of adolescent girls.

Last week, Naveen launched Khushi, a scheme to distribute free sanitary napkins to 17 lakh girl students from classes VI to XII.

Naveen thanked Premji for his support to the state's nutrition programme.

An MoU was signed between the Odisha government and Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives in December 2015 to address the problems of malnutrition with special focus on nutritionally vulnerable districts of the state.

According to the agreement, the Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives was supposed to spend about Rs 300 crore towards eradication of malnutrition and development of women in the state over a period of 8-10 years.

Earlier on Tuesday, delivering the Odisha Knowledge Hub lecture on "Government and philanthropic institutions working together for social change", Premji said: "Government and non-government philanthropic collaboration can enhance the community access to service delivery and set path to sustainable development."

"There are a number of NGOs in Odisha who have committed to serve and also have the ability to scale up their activities," he said.