Researchers Praise India’s Food Assistance Program

It was observed that India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) is the world’s largest food transfer program, and India’s most far-reaching social safety net. PDS operates in a similar manner to how food stamps worked in the United States in the past decades. In 2013, India’s federal government established minimum standards for the program. Many states had to increase their assistance as a result, providing either larger grain portions or lower prices.

The researchers compared the effects between states already meeting the federal standards and those that had to change. They used data from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, which, with support from the Gates Foundation, implemented a five-year survey of families in the program covering 30 villages across eight states.

The authors tracked children’s height for age as an indicator of malnutrition as that is associated with all sorts of bad long-run outcomes, including worse health outcomes and cognitive challenges, which affect education and income.

The researchers found that the average PDS expansion slashed stunting prevalence from 36% to 28.8%. These effects were most pronounced in children aged zero to two years, a critical window during which a child’s development is highly sensitive to nutritional intake.

Source: news.ucsb.edu