How to improve nutrition outcomes in India.

Only a handful of households in India have access to all nutrition-related schemes and interventions that the government provides suggests a new study.

To comprehensively tackle India’s persistent nutrition challenge, last March, the government launched an ambitious program. The ‘POSHAN Abhiyaan’ envisages complete elimination of malnutrition by 2020 and seeks to align several existing nutrition schemes that aim to, directly or indirectly, improve the nutritional status of pregnant women, mothers and children. In theory, this “convergence" of schemes sounds promising but in practice, POSHAN Abhiyaan may not be succeeding in bringing different schemes together to tackle malnutrition, suggests a new study.

In the study, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, Purnima Menon and others argue that there is little on-the-ground operational guidance for the Poshan Abhiyaan to ensure that multiple programmes effectively reach the same mother-child duo within the period of the first 1,000 days of a child’s birth—the critical period for nutrition for both child and mother.

The authors calculate that, across schemes, there are 19 nutrition-related interventions that target mother-child duos. These include access to clean drinking water, possession of a ration card and institutional delivery. The authors then, using data from a survey of 1,417 households in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal, check if mother-child duos are actually receiving these interventions. They find that while some interventions have reached as much as 75% of households, only two households received all 19 interventions.

According to the authors, a multisectoral approach to nutrition, like the one promoted by the POSHAN Abhiyaan, has worked in other countries in addressing malnutrition. However for POSHAN Abhiyaan to succeed in effectively delivering multiple nutrition interventions, there needs to be a greater focus on outcome-based success metrics.(Source: Livemint)