Assessing Progress in Nutrition: Proposing a Sub-district Tool for Monitoring and Governance

A lot of data is collected at state, district, block, and village levels across India as part of the monitoring and evaluation process for various government schemes ongoing in the country. Under the department of Women and Child Development in Karnataka a lot of data on children under 6 years of age and pregnant and lactating women is collected by Aanganwadi workers in the state. Although the current process of data collection, its analysis and interpretation require much more fiscal and human investment, it continues to generate large amounts of data. Interpretation of these data occur largely at the national and sub-national levels ignoring district and sub-district level variations in health and nutrition indices. Rarely are the results of this data analysis shared with district and sub-district level officials as they are not involved in policy formation. These officials also do not have training in data analysis and its interpretation and hence unable to use the vast sets of information available to them. This article is an effort to develop a monitoring and evaluation tool that uses easily available, taluk level data, from various sources to compute a cumulative nutrition index that can serve as a dipstick for monitoring nutrition status by block/district level officials.