Burden of Child Malnutrition in India: A View from Parliamentary Constituencies
A recent study led by Dr. S V Subramanian, Professor of Population Health and Geography at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, on “Burden of Child Malnutrition in India: A View from Parliamentary Constituencies”.
India Policy Insights (IPI), the flagship project of the Geographic Insights Lab at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has been designated as a Key Initiative of NITI Aayog, Government of India. It is a first-ever interactive policy dashboard for India’s 543 Parliamentary Constituencies (PCs), providing health, nutrition, and development data specifically designed to align with the political units represented by India’s Members of Parliament (MPs).
The study has analysed population data at the level of parliamentary constituencies which has the potential to bring political accountability to the data-driven policy discourse that is currently based on district-level estimates. Using data from the fourth National Family Health Survey 2016, two geographic information systems methodologies were developed and applied to provide estimates of four child malnutrition indicators (stunting, underweight, wasting, and anemia) for the 543 parliamentary constituencies in India. The results indicate that several constituencies experience a multiple burden of child malnutrition that must be addressed concurrently and as a priority.
This new partnership will significantly help strengthen NITI’s monitoring capacity by providing a first ever online geo-visual data platform that synthesizes and visually analyzes policy indicators related to health, nutrition and population across all districts, Parliamentary Constituencies, Assembly Constituencies and villages of India. This comprehensive public dashboard will allow policy makers, elected officials, government administrators and other stakeholders to leverage precision public health data to more accurately prioritize resources, make impactful adjustments to existing policy, and design more effective interventions going forward.
The initiative is being led by S V Subramanian, PhD, Professor of Population Health and Geography, Harvard University, and Honorary Senior Fellow, NITI Aayog.
The new PC Tracker provides performance data for over 90 policy indicators, including:
- Most Current indicator levels (2021)
- 5-year Change values (2016 to 2021)
- A new mapping of indicators to key Government of India (GOI) programs
- A new downloadable summary Factsheet for each PC (all indicators)