2013-14 Challenge  

Child Malnutrition in India

India is the second largest producer of rice and wheat, the world’s leading milk producer, and a major exporter of fish. At any given time, the country has up to 60 million tons of food grain buffer stocks yet, a third of the world’s malnourished children live here. Indeed, malnutrition is more common in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa, and India has the highest number of deaths of children under five years of age. To address the nutritional and developmental needs of its children, the Government of India launched a federal program called the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), the world’s largest early childhood program of its kind. One component of ICDS is the Supplementary Nutrition Program (SNP), which distributes nutritious meals through anganwadi centres, government sponsored child and mother-care centres.

In the past, the food served at anganwadi centres was procured centrally. Recently, the Government of India passed a law where food served at anganwadi centres is to be procured locally. In a village in rural Rajasthan, a group of women have thus begun a project to locally produce one metric ton of ready-to-eat fortified cereal per day for a few local anganwadi centres. The 20 women who run the small enterprise are now making a bit of money, saving it, using it to buy cloth, and sending their children to school. This year’s challenge focuses on creating a strategy to improve the operation of this enterprise.