How India Tracks Child Malnutrition in 2026: The Poshan Tracker Story
How India Tracks Child Malnutrition in 2026: The Poshan Tracker Story Every morning, lakhs of Anganwadi workers across India open a small government building, weigh the children who walk in, measure their height, and write down the numbers. For decades, those numbers stayed trapped in paper registers stacked in corners. A child slowly slipping toward malnutrition stayed invisible until the damage was visible in her body. That was the problem the Poshan Calculator was built to solve. India has run the Integrated Child Development Services since 1975, one of the largest child welfare programmes in the world. But for most of its history, the programme ran on paper. An Anganwadi worker maintained 11 separate registers by hand. Attendance in one register, growth records in another, ration distribution in a third, home visits in a fourth. At the end of the month, she copied numbers from register to register to build her report. Mistakes were not the exception. They were the routine. The...