Ms. Priyanka G will present her Pre-synopsis presentation as per the details below:

Date: 19th February 2026

Time: 1030 - 1130 hrs.

Venue: C-TARA Conference Room No.1

Title: Child Nutrition Policy and Program Implementation in India - A Multi-Layer Perspective

Supervisor: Prof. Parmeshwar D. Udmale 

Co-Supervisor: Prof. D. Parthasarathy

External Supervisor: Prof. Satish B. Agnihotri

RPC Members: Prof Sarthak Gaurav, Prof Amit Arora

Abstract:

Child undernutrition in India has persisted despite decades of policy attention, repeated programme reform, and the expansion of digital monitoring systems. This research examines how child nutrition policy is governed and enacted across administrative levels, taking the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and subsequent initiatives such as the National Nutrition Mission or POSHAN Abhiyaan as its empirical focus. Rather than evaluating policy success or failure, the study explores how nutrition policy is translated, coordinated, and stabilised within a large and complex welfare system.
The research is based on a multi-level, longitudinal policy ethnography conducted across national, state, district, project, block, and frontline institutional settings. Data were generated through sustained participant observation, informal interactions, semi-structured interviews, and engagement with policy documents and digital reporting platforms. Adopting a multi-level governance perspective as an analytical orientation, the study treats scale as an organising condition of policy practice rather than as a neutral administrative attribute.
Across levels, the analysis attends to everyday administrative routines, discretionary practices, and monitoring processes through which policy priorities are interpreted and enacted. It examines how institutional arrangements shape what becomes measurable and, thus, actionable within the system, and how repeated reform is absorbed into existing modes of governance. Particular attention is given to the role of digital instruments in reorganising reporting practices and accountability relations, and to the stabilisation of certain programme components that receive sustained attention while others remain less visible.
By tracing policy processes across administrative scales, the report offers a detailed account of how child nutrition governance operates in practice. It contributes to ongoing discussions in policy studies and welfare governance by providing an empirically grounded examination of policy enactment in a context marked by scale and fragmentation within sustained administrative activity.