STORIES OF CHANGE FOR NUTRITION IN INDIA

For too long, the stories about nutrition in India have been about the bleak situation for children growing up in India and the stark numbers.  How many times already have we now heard about the statistics of almost 1 child in 2 being stunted in India.  Although the Indian government has been slow to move on gathering new nutrition data and the data on child undernutrition are almost a decade old now, the decade itself has not been one of lack of movement or changes in policies and programs for nutrition in India.   In this blog post, we share with you two documents from UNICEF-India--Nutrition Wins: How Nutrition Makes Progress in India and Nutrition Moves: States Create Promising Change in India--that shed light on some of the positive stories of change for nutrition in India.

First, in Nutrition Wins, read about stories such as "wins" related to five broad areas of work in nutrition in India:  improving infant and young child feeding, preventing key nutrient deficiencies, improving nutrition for adolescent girls and women, providing nutritional care for severely malnourished children and excluded populations and last, but not least, making progress on building consensus, raising awareness, and governance.

Second, in Nutrition Moves, read about how in the context of India's decentralized governance system, state governments have taken ownership for nutrition, and created strategies to strengthen delivery of nutrition-focused actions, created partnerships to improve nutrition actions, built capacity for nutrition delivery, and developed specific strategies for reaching children who are particularly vulnerable.

In the discourse around nutrition in India, these stories for change and movement are refreshing in that they move beyond the numbers and speak about specific policy and program areas that have seen positive movement.  In addition to the stories highlighted in these reports, let's not forget about some important steps taken by the Government of India to strengthen actions for nutrition in recent years.

Here is a list of 10 things that we think are particularly important (some of these are in the UNICEF reports as well):

1. Universalizing the ICDS program to truly reach across the nation and deliver services for nutrition, health and child development
2. Strengthening health outreach through the National Rural Health Mission to scale-up immunizations and other essential services
3. Finalizing key reforms to the ICDS program to strengthen nutrition interventions for children under-three
4. Extending cash transfers to lactating women in the first six months of their child's life
5. Launching a 200-district program that embraces the multisectoral causality of nutrition
6. Developing guidelines for how nutrition interventions for issues such as IYCF, anemia and SAM can be strengthened within the Ministry of Health
7. Launching of state nutrition missions across India to bring high-level focus on nutrition in states as diverse as Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra
8. Exploring ways to integrate nutrition interests with sectors such as water-sanitation and women's empowerment (e.g., through women's self-help group programs)
9. Universal programs for the control of anemia in adolescent girls (WIFS and SABLA)
10. Recognizing children's right to food as part of the larger right to food agenda

Much change has indeed happened for nutrition policy and program actions in India.  However, gathering rigorous and thoughtful evidence on the kind of impact these policy and program changes have had, and will have, on maternal and child nutrition outcomes is critical to strengthen the field and keep the momentum going.  POSHAN looks forward to sharing such evidence with our network as it emerges.

Authors: Purnima Menon and Victor Aguayo