Tracking SDG targets on health and nutrition: Challenges and opportunities for streamlining surveys

The achievement of global sustainable development goals (SDGs) depends largely on India’s progress, given the country’s massive size and its moderate historical success in key health and nutrition outcomes over the last several years. This further increases the relevance and need for effective monitoring of India’s performance, through timely and disaggregated data, which ensures systematic assessments and course-correction. As India will be depending mainly on surveys to supply target-related data in the medium run, this paper classifies existing health and nutrition indicators from the draft National Indicator Framework (NIF), in terms of data availability. By highlighting the gaps in available data, the authors make specific recommendations to streamline existing surveys to align them with the requirements of an NIF for the SDGs. The authors review the draft NIF released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), and propose a revised one as part of this exercise.