How hunger came back to haunt India (Live Mint)

Live Mint published an article on how undernutrition in children is an urgent issue to address. In mid-December, the government released results from the 2019-20 National Family Health Survey (NFHS)for 10 major states, and in many ways, the picture that emerges is not so encouraging. Why, in spite of healthy economic growth, do we see so little progress on these indicators?  Should the NFHS be the only way to measure the health of families and children? Since 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has funded an IFPRI project, Poshan: “Partnerships and Opportunities to Strengthen and Harmonize Actions for Nutrition.” The project page states that “prominent studies we are undertaking include an evaluation of ICDS-CAS in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.” However, their publications seem to rely on, quite sensibly, on NFHS data far more than they do on real-time data from ICDS-CAS. The latter is barely used, if at all.  What is clear is that the nutrition agenda is increasingly driven by international agencies such as BMGF, UNICEF, IFPRI, and others.