Abstract
Background: Capacity building in nutrition has been viewed as an important strategy in accelerating undernutrition reduction in low and middle income countries. This paper investigates whether current nutrition programmes in India are aligned well enough to tackle the nutrition needs of the community.
 Objective: Nutrition curricula of postgraduate modules in India are analyzed to examine whether the current nutrition programs are in accord with the three pillars of nutrition (nutrition specific, nutrition sensitive and nutrition enabling environments).
 Methods: Combination of internet search, email and telephonic enquiries were used to collect the names of universities offering master’s degree in nutrition in India. The variables quantified include types of modules taught with respect to three nutrition pillars (nutrition specific, sensitive and enabling environment), quality of teaching materials, and reading lists and institutional attributes. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were used to accomplish the objectives of the study.
 Results: 116 universities in India offered 146 masters’ programmes in nutrition. Each program’s modules were listed (duplicates removed). Of these 680 modules, about two thirds were nutrition specific, 5% were underlying / basic and merely one tenth focused on public health nutrition. Further analysis of reading list available for 186 modules, suggests that of the total 2235 reading lists, only 4.2% were published in journals and 9.2% were recent publications.
 Conclusions: Nutrition curricula in Indian universities are dated, skewed towards the immediate determinants and over reliant on books. There is an urgent need to update and align readings to current thinking on how best to accelerate undernutrition.
Highlights
Undernutrition is implicated in 45% of under-5 mortality [1]
In the absence of data on pedagogy effectiveness and staff-student ratios, we focus on module reading lists: (a) how up to date are they? (b) What is the India/ non-India balance of authors cited? And (c) Where are the readings located—in books, journals, or grey materials? Our assumption is that more up to date papers, more diverse authorship and more publications in peer reviewed journals will reflect improved quality of reading materials available for learning
We used a combination of search words and phrases within the freely available search engines Google, Google Scholar and PubMed: ‘public health nutrition colleges’, ‘masters in public health nutrition’, ‘masters’ in nutrition’, ‘nutrition colleges’, ‘nutrition institutes’, ‘home science’, ‘community nutrition’, ‘therapeutic nutrition’, ‘food and nutrition’ in India
Summary
Undernutrition is implicated in 45% of under-5 mortality [1]. The children who survive and are stunted or wasted, are less productive at school and in the labour force and are more likely to live in poverty [2]. The rate as well as absolute numbers of stunted and wasted children under the age of 5 in India is among the highest in the world [3]. Countries with high burdens of undernutrition are estimated to suffer a GDP loss of 8-11 percent [2, 4]. India records 47 million children under 5 suffering from stunting and the highest number of women in the reproductive age group impacted by anaemia [5, 6]. Despite India’s rapid economic growth this high rate of stunting is declining slowly, even compared to other countries in the region and it is holding India back in terms of reducing the suffering of its people and increasing economic growth rates [7]. This paper investigates whether current nutrition programmes in India are aligned well enough to tackle the nutrition needs of the community
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