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Tackling pervasive malnutrition in India: WHEELS Global Foundation launches ‘Newborn Nutritional Health Initiative’
According to the NFHS data for 2019-2020, 36 percent of children under the age of five in India are stunted, 33 percent are underweight, and 17 percent are wasted.
Press event on / Courtesy Photo
Infant malnutrition is a massive concern in India, contributing to high rates of infant mortality and long-term health issues. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019-2020) data, 36 percent of children under the age of five in India are stunted, 33 percent are underweight, and 17 percent are wasted.
As per the survey, the exclusive breastfeeding rate for infants under six months of age in India is only 55.6 percent. Compounding further, awareness of ‘accurate’ breastfeeding is almost non-existent, resulting in babies typically getting only about 28 percent of available supply of milk from mothers. These statistics highlight the persistent challenges of infant malnutrition in India, despite efforts to address them through various government programs and interventions.
To address the problem, WHEELS Global Foundation, a social impact platform of the global IIT alumni community, has launched a technology-enabled strategic initiative called the New-born Nutritional Health Initiative in collaboration with the National Health Mission, Government of Madhya Pradesh.
This distinct public-private partnership model, aimed at driving sustained impact at scale, is supported by a major grant from the RIST Foundation and will be impacting the lives of over 10 million mothers and babies in rural areas of Madhya Pradesh.
Incorporating learnings from impressive results in several districts across three states (Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Chhattisgarh), the solution designed by WHEELS involve utilizing the most important source of nutrition for newborns - breast milk from the mother.
It leverages original research and fieldwork by Dr Rupal Dalal, a US-based pediatrician, conducted in slum areas to identify breastfeeding malpractices and applies the pioneering work of the IIT Bombay team, led by renowned Dr Kannan Moudgalya, through the Health Spoken Tutorials (HST) to enable cost and time-efficient nationwide scaling of 'breastfeeding techniques' training content and processes for frontline community health workers. Learning is delivered through a series of contextualized 10-minute self-learning modules that can be used offline or online and in more than 20 spoken languages.
Further, the solution integrates well-established scientific metrics to measure newborn growth over the most formative first two years of life. This application not only supports tracking progress and impact but also identifies workers or mothers who need additional training or expert intervention. It integrates with existing programs (such as providing vitamins and iron to pregnant mothers and vaccinations) and processes (such as the frequency of visits, data collection, and communication practices).
The complexity and magnitude of challenges in India’s health sector, with its 1.4 billion population, are hard to fathom. However, initiatives like this bring equal-scale optimism through the power of technology, innovation, impact ecosystem, and public-private partnerships, enabling us to deliver compelling and repeatable high-impact solutions at scale, touching the lives of millions. This is what society and the country expect of the IIT brand.
Priyanka Das, Mission Director of the National Health Mission, Government of Madhya Pradesh, said, “As a matter of policy, exclusive breastfeeding is mandated for the first six months of a newborn’s life. In Madhya Pradesh, we are first taking this program to the seven most challenged districts and then scaling it to the rest of the state through the master-trainer bench we are creating.”
As a social impact arm initiated by, but not limited to, the PanIIT Community, WHEELS hopes to scale this technology-enabled initiative across all 29 states in India and many other parts of the world to ensure every baby has a chance for a fully developed brain and a healthy life.
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad)
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