Visualizing Village Level Child Undernutrition in India

We mapped the burden of childhood undernutrition across all of the nearly 600,000 villages in rural India to enable prioritization of interventions in a geographically precise way. We used data from the 2016 Indian Demographic and Health Survey and the 2011 Indian Census for village-level demographics and amenities to predict child stunting, underweight, and wasting for all villages in India. Substantial variations in undernutrition across villages became evident. For instance, while the average predicted rate of stunting across all villages was 37.9%, in 691 villages the average predicted rate of stunting was under 5%, while in 453 villages it exceeded 70%. Our mapping also revealed villages with high burdens of undernutrition geographically juxtaposed with lower-burdened villages.  In the interactive dashboard below, users can further explore these granular geographic variations and rankings of villages across India.