According to latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data in India, 36% of children are stunted, 32% are underweight, and 21% are wasted. All that in spite of the fact that 64% of women exclusively breastfeed their babies. Behind this alarming data is the barely known fact – pervasive poor breastfeeding techniques that result in babies constantly crying for milk and mother’s giving up in frustration to switch prematurely to external baby feeds if they can afford& easily find. A problem that is completely fixable, and rather give those 86% of malnourished babies a chance of a healthy life – physically and mentally.
WHEELS Global Foundation (a social impact platform of global IIT alumni community)’s Newborn Nutritional Health Initiative is scaling pioneering work of IIT Bombay’s Health Spoken Tutorials (HST) team to address pervasive newborn malnutrition at scale. Washington D.C. based RIST (Rural India Supporting Trust) with a large grant is supporting scaling of deployment of this initiative across one of the largest State in India, Madhya Pradesh, so as to impact lives of >10m mothers and babies. After amazing results in several districts across three States (Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Chhattisgarh) where the babies gained as much as five-fold more weight in first six months and exceeded all WHO standards, HST team has taken its Cuedwell technology-enabled train-the-trainer model to enable thousands of health & ICDS workers so mothers can be taught proper breast-feeding and nutritional intake practices.
On 9th April, Consulate General of India (CGI), New York, hosted WHEELS leadership team along with several well-known IIT alumni, and its partners who are complimenting its newborn nutritional health program with daily healthy meals to underserved school kids across rural India — Annapoorna Trust serving >9m meals a day and Akshaya Patra Foundation serving >2m meals a day. Given the massive benefits mothers and babies would drive from these simple-to-learn (via IIT-Bombay’s HST team’s >10010-min long video tutorials) towards a healthy life and healthy society, CGI and WHEELS hope those who missed attending the public event would visit WHEELS’ initiative page to learn and benefit from this pioneering research and dedicated effort from a passionate team, and help scale the effort to entire India and all over the world.