Poshan abhiyaan.gov.in monitoring

While India’s malnutrition rates have improved over the recent years, the country is still home to the largest number of stunted and wasted children in the world. To combat the dismal state of nutrition in the country, the government launched the Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nourishment (POSHAN) Abhiyaan (‘movement’) in 2017, a flagship mission that aims at a convergence mechanism for the country’s response to malnutrition. This special report examines the implementation of the programme in India’s eastern states, and outlines ways to scale-up the innovative techniques adopted by them. Attribution: Shoba Suri and Kriti Kapur, “POSHAN Abhiyaan: Fighting Malnutrition in the Time of a Pandemic,” ORF Special Report No. 124, December 2020, Observer Research Foundation. Introduction Child and maternal undernutrition is the single largest health risk factor in India, responsible for 15 percent of India’s total disease burden. [1] Malnutrition in children manifests either in the form of ‘stunting’ (low height in relation to age) or ‘wasting’ (low weight in relation to height) or both. India is home to almost one-third of all the world’s stunted children (46.6 million out of 149 million) and half the world’s wasted children (25.5 million out of 51 million). [2] Data from the fourth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) of 2015-16 shows that 38 percent and 21 percent of children under five years are, respectively, stunted and wasted. [3] At the same time, the ra...

This policy note, developed jointly with NITI Aayog and IDinsight, aims to provide guidance to national, state, and district level government officials/stakeholders on issues to consider on the use of data to track progress on nutrition interventions, immediate and underlying determinants, and outcomes. It proposes an indicator framework for POSHAN Abhiyaan and examines availability of data on these indicators across both population-based surveys and administrative data systems. Finally, it lays out issues to be considered in strengthening efforts to improve the use of data in the context of POSHAN Abhiyaan and makes key recommendations on improving data availability and improving the use of currently available data. Recommendations 1. Data prioritization A set of core indicators across the lifecycle should be prioritized and reviewed at all levels (national, state, district, and block). To track progress towards POSHAN Abhiyaan goals and targets, a set of core indicators across the lifecycle should be prioritized for monitoring the progress, diagnosis, and action in both population-based surveys and administrative data systems. These core indicators should be reviewed at national, state and district levels across existing review mechanisms. The data review highlights that several possible indicators are available for each intervention and from multiple data sources. Therefore, it is important to identify core data sources based on the potential data use scenarios (e.g., u...