Lessons from the State Nutrition Missions of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh

This brief documents the work of the State Nutrition Missions in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, identifying lessons learned and policy recommendations moving forward. Results for Development partnered with Amaltas Consulting and UNICEF-India to deliver this brief.

Background

India is home to about a third of all global cases of chronic undernutrition. Almost 40 per cent of children under the age of five exhibit stunted growth.1 As a whole India’s rates of undernutrition have improved significantly – rates of stunting declined from 48 to 39 per cent from 2005-06 to 2013-15.Yet the country still lags behind in terms of achieving the World Health Assembly’s targets for stunting.2 Across India, there is tremendous variability in nutrition outcomes; state-level analyses are critical to understand the complexities of undernutrition in the country. Over the past two decades, state governments in India have instituted a large number of programmes across a number of sectors that seek to address the strikingly high levels of undernutrition seen in most Indian states. The underlying causes of undernutrition are complex; therefore, to address and ameliorate undernutrition effectively requires that political will exists and that the government coordinates efforts and actions across multiple departments.