Despite being the world’s fastest-growing major economy aspiring to reach $5 trillion in GDP, India’s nutrition status leaves much to be desired. We may not exactly be food insecure, but we are surely not nutrition secure. Our policies fail to appreciate the nexus between food, nutrition, and health.
It is widely recognised that under-nutrition exerts long-term adverse effects on human health, labour productivity, and general well-being. Perpetual under-nutrition results in low resistance to infections and increased morbidity. Higher healthcare costs and reduced labour productivity are a potently negative combination.
Various determinants of malnutrition include household food insecurity; illiteracy and lack of awareness, especially among women; limited access to healthcare services, availability of safe drinking water, sanitation, and environmental conditions; and purchasing power.
Additionally, early age at marriage (girls); teenage pregnancies that often result in low birth weight of the newborns; poor breastfeeding practices; inadequate complementary feeding; ignorance about nutritional needs of infants and young children; repeated infections; and so on aggravate malnutrition.
The implications for our country are serious, given the age profile of the population.
Roughly, a fourth of the population is less than 14 years of age, while two-thirds are between 15 and 64 years of age. The size of the elderly population (60+) is set to rise in the coming decade. With every passing year, the number of youngsters expected to enter the working-age stream swells.
Under the 15th Finance Commission, various components like Anganwadi services, Poshan Abhiyaan, and the Scheme for Adolescent Girls (of 14-18 years in Aspirational Districts and the North-Eastern region) have been subsumed under the umbrella Mission Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 (Mission Poshan 2.0) to address the challenge of malnutrition.
It is a centrally sponsored mission where the responsibility for the implementation of various activities lies with the states and union territories. This mission is a universal self-selecting umbrella scheme where there are no entry barriers for any beneficiary to register and receive services.
Under this mission, supplementary nutrition is provided to children (6 months to 6 years), pregnant women, lactating mothers, and adolescent girls to beat the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition by adopting a lifecycle approach.
According to the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development, supplementary nutrition is provided in accordance with the nutrition norms contained in Schedule-II of the National Food Security Act. These norms were revised in January 2023, as the old norms were largely calorie-specific.
The revised norms are said to be more comprehensive and balanced in terms of both quantity and quality of supplementary nutrition based on the principles of diet diversity that provide for quality protein, healthy fats, and micronutrients.
Although various rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), conducted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare since 1992-93, have shown improvement in malnutrition indicators in children across India, the present status is far from comforting.
According to the last available NHFS-5 (2019-21), 35.5% of children under the age of five suffered stunting (impaired growth resulting in below-average height for age); 32.1% were underweight (bodyweight considered too low to be healthy), and 19.3% faced wasting (low weight for height).
The projected population of all children up to 5 years old in India for the year 2021 is about 13.75 crores (source: Population Projections for India and States 2011-2036, National Commission on Population, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare).
However, only 7.36 crore of children up to 5 years old were enrolled in Anganwadis and registered on the Poshan Tracker of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, as per the June 2025 data. Seven crore of these children were measured on growth parameters of height and weight. Of them, 37.07% are found to be stunted, 15.93% underweight, and 5.46% wasted.
Malnutrition indicators of children (0-5 years) in the country show stark inter-state variations. The incidences of wasting and underweight are far higher in states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, while the Southern states, although not exactly in the pink of health, are generally doing relatively better.
It is necessary to highlight the tragic irony of Madhya Pradesh, a protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) hotspot. Despite being the country’s largest producer of two high-protein crops—soybean and chickpea (gram/chana)—the state’s nutrition status is a cause for concern.
Both soybean and chana are protein-rich legumes. As compared with the cost of animal protein (milk, egg, meat), vegetable protein from legumes is a lot more economical. What has prevented the MP government all these years from utilising the natural endowment to address protein deficiency in the state remains a mystery.
G. Chandrashekhar is an economist, senior editor and policy commentator specialising in commodity markets. Views are personal.
