Nutrition Financing in India:Some Reflections

Malnutrition and related health complexities are creating a plethora of challenges to human development. The context of India is not an exception for the multifaceted impacts of malnutrition. The policy frameworks and program based interventions in India had given enough attention to address the issues of nutrition in a pragmatic manner. The question that arises here is whether these policies and programs budgeted appropriately or not? The policies itself won’t be materialized as action unless enough resources are allocated. In this context, the present paper focuses on analyzing the efforts of the Union governments to address health and nutritional problems of children. The paper further look into the nutrition-specific as well as nutrition-sensitive interventions by examining the budget outlays and implementation of interventions for improving nutrition. The available secondary database was significantly utilized as the source of information for this study. The reflections from the analysis indicate some of the unpromising trends. Although the allocation of National Health Mission (NHM), which is the core scheme for health-related interventions, has increased by 9.5 percent it constitutes only one percent of total union budget. The budget allocation for ICDS has not increased significantly in accordance with the time and needs. The budget for the important components of NHM, the Reproductive and child health (RCH), is also declining. Therefore ministries need to come together and try to focus nutrition specific and sensitive schemes for the nutrition of children.