Ms. Priyanka will present her APS as per the detail below:
Date: 25th February 2025
Time: 09:00- 10:00 AM
Venue: Conference Room No.1, C-TARA Office
Title: Child Nutrition Policy and Program Implementation in India - A Multi-Layer Perspective
Supervisor: Prof. Satish B. Agnihotri
Co-Supervisor: Prof. Parmeshwar D. Udmale
External Supervisor: Prof. D. Parthasarathy
RPC Members: Prof Sarthak Gaurav, Prof Amit Arora
Abstract:
Child malnutrition is a global public health crisis with far-reaching implications for morbidity, mortality, cognitive development, and adult productivity. The persistence of child malnutrition in India, despite decades of government initiatives, i.e. the Integrated Child Development Scheme and the POSHAN Abhiyaan, underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of policy processes. This research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of child nutrition policy and implementation in India across multiple levels of the implementation hierarchies.
The study adopts participant observation and semi-structured interviews at each organisational level, including the federal, regional, district, project, and community levels. This goes beyond the conventional social science research that typically focuses on one or two levels and allows for an in-depth exploration of perspectives surrounding child nutrition policy at and across all levels.
The Annual Progress Seminar report looks at child nutrition policy and programme implementation in India from a multi-layer perspective. It covers policy evolution, policy processes and perceptions held at different levels, with special focus on digitisation. Field immersion experiences at the central, state, district, project, sector and anganwadi levels are narrated by connecting them to the existing literature on these themes. The report also highlights the points of departure from the available literature. The central, state and district levels constitute the major policy formulation arena. In contrast, levels of district and below constitute the implementation hierarchy, with the district emerging as an interface between the two. The top-down approach in programme implementation, absence of feedback loops in policy design, gaps between the policy rhetoric and the reality of resource allocation, strong emphasis on event management, strictly centralised control of data, and the receding scope of civil society engagement recur during this narration. A similar hiatus is noticed between the rhetoric of convergence and the endurance of sectoral silos - a trait the digital database has been unable to escape. In essence, what one may be witnessing is the high digital modernism, to take a leaf from Scott 1999, and the "métis" of coping mechanisms aimed primarily at the control of information and maintaining the appearance of performance rather than tackling undernutrition. Eventually, coming to the position taken by Toyama in his analysis of technology, that it only magnifies the intent of the user and does not create it.