Health & Nutrition

At Accountability Initiative, we see funding as a key piece in the puzzle of building a public health system that is responsive to needs. While India continues to spend much lower than most other countries on public health as a proportion of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), utilisation of funds in India’s flagship health schemes like the National Health Mission (NHM) remain low. As India faces an important shift in disease burden from communicable to non-communicable diseases, this is a critical time to ensure optimal delivery of public health services by policy-makers, administrators and frontline functionaries. We have partnered with state governments and multilateral organisations to understand the existing root causes of lapses in financing public health systems of states. We have tracked the functioning of nutrition programmes in Chhattisgarh, parsed the public financing system in Uttar Pradesh, and carefully analysed the impact of the Government of India’s welfare programmes for new mothers. An enabled system can recognise and work to address the needs of the people. Our commentary and publicly available reports are an attempt to provide deeper understanding to the public on health and nutrition related matters, issues that impact them.