India’s Child Malnutrition Crisis Deepens: Stunting, Wasting and the Slow Pace of Progress

Current Status: What the Numbers Tell Us

India’s 2025 Global Hunger Index (GHI) score is 25.8 (out of possible worst 100), categorised as “serious” hunger. The country is ranked 102nd out of 123 countries with sufficient data.
Key indicators driving the score:

• Prevalence of undernourishment: 12.0 % of the population.
• Child stunting (under-five years): 32.9 %.
• Child wasting (weight-for-height): 18.7 %.

According to Global Nutrition Report data, 34.7 % of children under five in India are stunted and 17.3 % wasted—both above regional (South Asia) averages (21.8 % stunting, 8.9 % wasting).
A 2025 peer-reviewed study (published September) points out that improvements between 2015-16 and 2019-21 were minimal and uneven across states; in some cases, child nutrition worsened.

These figures are troubling in a country that has posted sustained economic growth (~7 %+ GDP) over recent years. The disconnect between growth and nutrition has been labelled the “Indian enigma”.

What’s Behind the Slow Progress? Structural and Emerging Drivers

Several converging factors explain why nutrition progress is slower than expected.

Diet Quality & Food Systems

While access to food has improved, diet quality remains poor—heavy reliance on cereals, inadequate protein and micronutrient intake, rising consumption of processed foods, especially in urbanising India. The Global Nutrition Report flags that India is ‘on course’ for stunting reduction but has made “no progress” toward wasting reduction.
The poor quality of diets is compounded by intra-household food allocation issues, maternal nutrition deficits, and low diversity in rural diets.

Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH) and Environmental Stress

Malnutrition is not just about food—it is about repeated infections, enteric diseases, poor sanitation and environmental contamination. The recent study highlighted that children in states with poorer WASH scores had worse nutrition outcomes even with similar incomes.
Further, environmental risks—such as air pollution, crop-residue burning, climate shifts—may compromise birth weights, height growth, gut health and nutrient absorption. Analysts warn that without integrating environmental health and nutrition policy, the gains will remain limited.

Socio-economic & Geographic Disparities

Nutrition progress is highly uneven across India’s states and within states across socio-economic strata. Although national averages show some improvement over two decades, many poorer states and districts are lagging or regressing. The study found some states recorded declines in progress between NFHS rounds.
Maternal education, women’s empowerment, access to health services, timely immunisation, and local governance quality remain strong predictors of child nutrition outcomes.

Recent Shocks: Pandemic, Climate, Food Price Volatility

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted food systems, nutrition services (Anganwadi, ICDS, school-midday meals), income streams and health access. The 2025 study notes that the pandemic period slowed progress significantly.
Meanwhile, climate change induced stress—heat waves, flooding, droughts—impacts agricultural yield, household incomes and dietary access. These indirect effects are less charted but growing in importance. Without shock-resilience built into nutrition programmes, gains may be reversed.

Policy Responses: Achievements and Gaps

India’s policy architecture for nutrition is among the most extensive in the world:

• POSHAN Abhiyaan (Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition) targeting stunting, wasting, anaemia, low birth weight and breast-feeding.
  State-level convergence committees, NFSA (National Food Security Act), Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Mid-Day Meal-Scheme, Anaemia Mukt Bharat, etc.
• Recent expansions include fortified foods (double-fortified salt, food-fortification policy), greater focus on early childhood (first 1,000 days), mobile tracking, data dashboards and district-level performance metrics.
  The Chaibasa (Jharkhand) field intervention achieved 78 % recovery rate among severely malnourished children using a fortified ‘Shishu Shakti’ take-home ration pilot—indicating potential innovation in service-delivery.

Yet, despite the scale and ambition of programmes, gaps remain:

• Implementation capacity and accountability: Many studies highlight weak linkages between policy design and field-level delivery—staff shortages, incomplete monitoring, logistic bottlenecks, data lags.The 2025 study emphasised that states which combined nutrition delivery with sanitation, early-childhood stimulation and maternal health services improved better; where nutrition programmes operated in isolation, impact was muted.
• Integration with environmental and agriculture policy: Nutrition programmes are rarely integrated with climate-change adaptation, food-system resilience, agriculture diversification, or urban informal-sector livelihoods. The “enigma” stems in part from ignoring the broader system around nutrition.As one analysis states: “What India needs is band-aid plus backbone”—nutrition-schemes plus structural change in food systems, sanitation, gender equity.
• Focus on wasting and emergency nutrition: While stunting reduction has moderate momentum, wasting remains stubborn. Given India’s annual burden of wasting (~17-18 % of under-5), programme emphasis on acute malnutrition care, therapeutic feeding, and rapid response remains under-scaled.The Global Nutrition Report noted “no progress” on the wasting target.
• Nutrition in urban and informal-sector contexts: Much of India’s nutrition narrative is rural-centric. With rapid urbanisation, migration, informal employment, and shifting food patterns, urban malnutrition (both under- and over-nutrition) is rising but lacks data and policy traction.UNICEF’s global report shows overweight among children is rising—even in low-income countries.

Environment-Nutrition Nexus: Emerging Risks for India

Nutrition cannot be decoupled from environmental factors in India’s context. Two key links are notable:

Climate Stress and Agriculture Resilience

Unreliable rainfall, extreme heat, and crop-yield swings threaten household food availability and dietary diversity, particularly for smallholder rural families dependent on subsistence production. Households with income shocks tend to shift to cheaper calorie-dense but nutrient-poor diets, exacerbating micronutrient deficiencies, wasting and stunting.

Pollution, Health and Nutrient Absorption

Emerging research suggests high ambient air-pollution, repeated respiratory infections, EED (Environmental Enteric Dysfunction) and unsafe water undermine children’s capacity to absorb nutrients—even if calorie intake is adequate. For India, where air-quality and sanitation remain challenging, this creates an “absorption barrier” to nutrition gains. Thus merely increasing food-intake may not suffice; the environment of the child matters. Some authors credit this factor with part of the “Indian enigma”.

In sum, the nutrition agenda must extend beyond feeding—to food-systems, sanitation, climate resilience and urban-health contexts.

What Needs to Happen: A Roadmap for the Next Phase (2025-30)

To get India back on track for the global targets (such as SDG 2.2: end all forms of malnutrition by 2030), the following steps are critical:

1. Integration of systems: Nutrition programmes must link with agriculture, water & sanitation, early-childhood development, maternal-health, and social-protection platforms. The next five years should shift from stand-alone schemes to converged delivery models.
   Action-point: rollout state-level “Nutrition +” dashboards that unify ICDS, WASH, agriculture, climate-resilience and social-welfare data.
2. Focus on wasting and acute malnutrition: Scaling community-led therapeutic-feeding, rapid nutrition-surveillance, emergency readiness in drought/flood/burn-season zones.
   Action-point: target all NCD (nutrition-community) districts with mobile nutrition-units plus tele-health-monitoring by 2027.
3. Urban nutrition strategy: Adapt programmes for urban poor, migrant households, informal-sector workers and city-slum infants. Data generation, nutritional screening, flexible service-models are needed.
   Action-point: pilot “urban ICDS outreach pods” in 10 metropolitan zones by 2026.
4. Food-system reform for diversity and quality: Move beyond cereal subsidies to protein, pulses, millets, fortified foods and local produce. Link school-meals, midday-meals, Anganwadi plates to local ecosystems, shorter supply-chains, indigenous foods.
   Action-point: mandate 30 % of midday–meal sourcing from local small-farms/indigenous crops in high-stunting districts by 2028.
5. Environmental health linkages: Incorporate climate-nutritional vulnerability into district-nutrition plans. For example, districts with heavy crop-burning seasons or poor air-quality should receive “nutrition-stress-buffer” budgets (extra Take-Home Ration, filtration support) to absorb the “absorption barrier”.
   Action-point: develop “nutrition-climate overlay” maps by 2026, target buffer zones 2026-27.
6. Monitoring, accountability & local capacity: Strengthen frontline delivery: Anganwadi workers, ANMs, district nutrition-units. Ensure timely data (monthly dashboards), public transparency (nutrition budget vs outcome), community-feedback loops (mother-groups, village health-committees).
   Action-point: empower 300 district-nutrition-cells as “outcome-units” by 2027 with budget & community-scoreboard duties.

Why This Matters: Beyond the Children**

The stakes are high. Child malnutrition imperils India’s human-capital ambitions. Stunting diminishes cognitive development, future earnings, productivity—locking-in inter-generational disadvantage. Wasting raises mortality risk and health-costs. When nearly one in three children is affected, the economic, social and moral costs accumulate.
Worse, failure to reduce under-nutrition strengthens vulnerability to climate shocks, pandemics and rapid urbanisation. In a country aiming for a $5 trillion economy, persistent nutritional gaps impose a silent drag.
Furthermore, the shift in global nutrition—from under-nutrition alone to the double burden (coexistence of under- and over-nutrition) adds complexity. The rising overweight and obesity among children (globally and emerging in India) signal that mere calorie-access is no longer enough—quality, balance and systems matter.

Conclusion**

India’s fight against child malnutrition stands at a pivotal juncture. The architecture is robust, the policy-intent clear, and the funding significant—but results remain under-whelming. The 2025-education and growth phase must pivot towards structural, system-wide change. Without integrating diet quality, environment, health-systems, urban outreach and climate-resilience, the country risks missing its 2030 nutrition targets—and with them, a significant chunk of its demographic dividend.
In the words of the recent peer-reviewed study: “Rapid economic growth without rapid nutrition improvement is a lose-lose.”
The next five years will determine whether India becomes a nutrition success story—or a lingering under-nutrition caution.