The Aspirational Districts Programme (ADP) of the Government of India aims to quickly and effectively transform 112 of the most underdeveloped districts across the country through scheme convergence, collaboration, and competition among districts. Nutrition being a key component and Uttar Pradesh being the largest state in the country, this study aims to analyze the child nutrition levels in eight aspirational districts of the state using the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019-21, data. Finding suggests stunting rates in the Aspirational Districts (45.08%) are substantially higher than the average for all districts of Uttar Pradesh (39.71%). Similarly, children in the Aspirational Districts of the state experience higher wasting rates (20.35%) compared to the state average of 17.32%. Across all Aspirational Districts, 38.07% of children are underweight, compared to 32.14% for the state overall. Similarly, 15.65% of children in Aspirational Districts are severely underweight, compared to just 11.13% across the state. A multivariate analysis of the effects of selected demographic and socioeconomic factors on child malnutrition indicates that the strongest predictors of child nutrition in India are the child's age and birth order, mother's education, and household socioeconomic status in terms of wealth quintiles. Older children and children of higher birth order are more likely to be malnourished. Children whose mothers are more educated and children who live in households with relatively high wealth quintiles tend to be better nourished than other children.
Pandey et al. (Wed,) studied this question.