Author: Smile Foundation

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Makar Sankranti 2026 Celebrations

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date January 4, 2026
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Makar Sankranti is one of India’s most important festivals and is celebrated with great fervor. Celebrated on the 14th of January every year, it marks the end of winter and beginning of spring and hence holds cultural, social, religious and geographical significance.

It’s the perfect occasion to take part in various activities such as kite flying, cooking special festive dishes like til gul laddu (sesame sweet balls) or sakkarai pongal (sweet rice porridge), and performing religious rituals. Read on to learn about the different ways you can celebrate Makar Sankranti 2026!

What is Makar Sankranti?

Makar Sankranti is a popular Hindu festival that celebrates the transition of the sun from Sagittarius (Dhanu) to Capricorn (Makara). It marks the end of the winter season and the beginning of spring. The day is also considered auspicious for starting new ventures.

The festival is celebrated all over India with great pomp and show. The most popular way to celebrate Makar Sankranti is by flying kites. People of all ages come out in their balconies and terraces to fly kites. In some parts of India, kite flying competitions are also held on this day.

Another popular way to celebrate Makar Sankranti is by taking a dip in sacred rivers like Ganga and Yamuna. It is believed that doing so purifies one’s soul and body. Devotees also offer prayers to the sun god, Lord Surya on this day.

Makar Sankranti celebrations also include feasting on traditional sweets like til gud ladoo, til laddoo, phirni, rewari etc. Families and friends get together to enjoy this special day which comes only once a year!

The History of This Festival

Makar Sankranti is a popular Hindu festival that celebrates the transition of the sun from Sagittarius (Dhanu) to Capricorn (Makara). It is observed every year on January 14th in India. The day marks the end of the month with the winter solstice and the start of longer days.

Makar Sankranti is considered to be one of the most auspicious days in the Hindu calendar. On this day, Hindus offer prayers to Sun god, take holy dips in rivers and perform other religious rituals. They also exchange gifts and sweets with their loved ones.

The word ‘Sankranti’ means ‘transition’. Makar refers to the Capricorn zodiac sign and Sankranti marks the transition of the sun into this sign. Makar Sankranti is also known as Uttarayan as it marks the beginning of longer days (uttara means north).

The festival has great significance in agriculture as it signals the end of winter and commencement of spring harvest season. In some parts of India, Makar Sankranti is also celebrated as a harvest festival.

There are many legends associated with Makar Sankranti. One popular legend says that on this day, Lord Vishnu defeated two powerful demons named Madhu and Kaitabha. Another legend tells the story of how Sage Kapila gave liberation (moksha)

How is Makar Sankranti Celebrated?

Makar Sankranti is celebrated in many ways across India. The most common way to celebrate is by flying kites! Families and friends get together to fly kites of all shapes and sizes. The sky is filled with color as people compete to see who can keep their kite in the air the longest.

Another popular way to celebrate this festival is by feasting on traditional sweets and dishes. Common items include til laddus (sesame balls), gajak (a type of candy made from sesame seeds), and pongal (a rice dish). Many families also take a dip in holy rivers or lakes, as it is believed that this will help purify them and bring good luck for the year ahead.

What are the Traditions ?

Makar Sankranti is considered to be one of the most auspicious festivals in the Hindu calendar. It is celebrated on the 14th of January every year and marks the beginning of the sun’s transit into the Makara (Capricorn) rashi (zodiac sign). The day also marks the end of the month with the winter solstice and the start of longer days.

Celebrations vary across different regions in India. In Maharashtra, for instance, people celebrate by flying kites while in Tamil Nadu, they take part in a special puja called ‘Pongal’. People also offer prayers to Sun God, take holy dips in rivers and exchange gifts with family and friends on this day.

One of the most important aspects of Makar Sankranti celebrations is feasting. A variety of traditional sweets and snacks are prepared on this day and exchanged among relatives and friends. The most popular sweet dish made on Makar Sankranti is ‘tilgul ladoo’, made from sesame seeds and jaggery. Other popular dishes include ‘ khichdi’, ‘puri’, ‘kheer’ etc.

Makar Sankranti- New Possibilities

Makar Sankranti is one of India’s most widely celebrated festivals, observed across regions under different names and traditions. While customs may vary from kite flying in Gujarat to Pongal in Tamil Nadu, the essence of festival remains universal. It marks the sun’s transition into Capricorn and the beginning of Uttarayan, a phase associated with light, growth and renewal. For centuries, this moment has symbolised hope, progress and the promise of new beginnings.

Traditionally, the Makar Sankranti is seen as an auspicious time to start afresh. Families choose this day to begin new ventures, make important life decision or take their first steps towards long-held aspirations. This festival’s deeper meaning lies not just in rituals or celebrations, but in its quiet reminder that growth begins when we align ourselves with opportunity and purpose.

In this spirit of renewal, the festival invites us to reflect on what truly constitutes a new beginning especially for a child. For millions of children across underserved communities in India, the most transformative new beginning is education. Education is not merely the act of learning to read or write; it is the foundation upon which a child’s future is built. It equips them with confidence, awareness and the ability to imagine a life beyond inherited limitations.

When a child enters the classroom for the first time, it marks more than an individual milestone. It signals a turning point for the entire family and often, the community they belong to. Education opens doors to better livelihoods, improved health outcomes and informed decision-making. It breaks the cycle of poverty and create pathways to dignity and self-reliance, not just for the child, but mostly for their families who see their child studying as a hope for better future for all.

Spread Smiles & New Beginnings

This Makar Sankranti, the idea of new beginning let’s extend beyond personal resolutions. Let’s make it as an opportunity to create meaningful changes- by supporting a child’s education, that shall set them for a journey of transformation. Such a gesture does not end with a single child, it ripples outward, strengthening families and uplifting entire communities.

Makar Sankranti 2026 is around the corner and the celebrations plans with traditional sweets and joys is in the pipelines, however, to celebrate the spirit of new beginnings, let’s together celebrate young learners of Smile Foundation’s Mission Education center, who are all set to build their lives with the education, they shall receive with your support.

It is time we collectively enable children of lesser privileged communities of India to initiate their new beginning with more education and opportunities.

Tags Celebrate Makar Sankranti, Makar Sankranti, Makar Sankranti Celebration

Gender

Savitribai Phule Knew This Would Happen

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date January 3, 2026
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In 1848, when Savitribai Phule opened one of India’s first schools for girls in Pune, she did not describe her work as charity. She called it justice.

The distinction matters. Nearly two centuries later, as India celebrates rising enrolment numbers for girls, the global development community continues to ask why learning outcomes remain fragile, why adolescent girls disappear from classrooms, and why education so often fails to translate into autonomy. Savitribai Phule anticipated these questions long before the language of “human capital” or “gender parity” entered policy vocabulary. She understood that education for girls was not about access alone, but about power, dignity and resistance to inherited inequality.

What she built was not merely a school, but a counter-system.

Education as confrontation, not accommodation

Savitribai Phule’s classrooms were radical spaces because they challenged three structures simultaneously: caste hierarchy, patriarchal control and moral policing of women’s bodies. She taught girls who were considered unteachable, daughters of families told they had nothing worth educating for. She walked to school every day knowing she would be abused, spat on or threatened. She carried an extra sari because she expected it to be soiled.

This was not symbolic activism. It was systemic disruption.

Savitribai insisted that literacy was inseparable from self-respect. In her poems and speeches, education was a weapon against humiliation, not a ladder to social approval. She warned that schooling which merely trained girls to be “better wives” was another form of enclosure. For her, education had to produce moral courage, economic independence, and the ability to question authority, including family authority.

That insight remains unsettlingly relevant.

Why enrolment is not the same as education

Globally, girls’ enrolment has improved dramatically over the past three decades. India is often cited as a success story. However, data repeatedly shows that the real rupture happens during adolescence. Puberty, household labour, safety concerns, early marriage, digital exposure and mental health pressures converge to push girls out of school or reduce learning to survival.

Savitribai Phule would not have been surprised.

She understood that schools fail girls not only when they exclude them, but when they refuse to adapt to their realities. A classroom that ignores menstruation, hunger, language barriers, caste discrimination or domestic labour is not neutral. It is complicit.

Modern education systems still struggle with this truth. Policy frameworks focus on infrastructure and curriculum reform, but often neglect the invisible labour required to keep girls learning: counselling, mentorship, health support, community negotiation and sustained trust with families.

This is where Savitribai’s legacy is most urgent today.

The forgotten architecture of support

Savitribai Phule did not work alone. Her schools were embedded in a broader ecosystem of care. She and Jyotirao Phule ran shelters for widows, supported survivors of sexual violence, and advocated for maternal health. Education, for them, was inseparable from social protection.

That integrated vision is precisely what contemporary systems often fragment.

In many low-income communities, the barriers to girls’ education are rarely academic. They are logistical, emotional, and social. A girl may be enrolled in school, but exhausted from domestic work. She may attend class, but lack confidence in mathematics because no one ever told her she belonged there. She may be present, but silent.

The lesson Savitribai offers is uncomfortable but clear: education systems that do not invest in non-academic support are not incomplete, they are ineffective.

Where civil society steps in

This is where organisations like Smile Foundation play a critical role in contemporary India. Not as substitutes for the state, but as translators between policy intent and lived reality.

Working across urban slums and rural districts, Smile Foundation’s girl child programme focuses explicitly on girls navigating precisely the transitions Savitribai warned about. The interventions go beyond classroom instruction. We integrate remedial learning, digital access, health screening, nutrition support, menstrual hygiene education and sustained engagement with families.

What is notable is not the scale alone, but the philosophy. Girls are not treated as beneficiaries to be retained, but as learners whose confidence, curiosity and agency must be actively rebuilt. Teachers are supported not just with content, but with tools to recognise learning gaps and emotional distress. Communities are engaged as stakeholders, not obstacles.

In this sense, Smile Foundation’s work echoes Savitribai’s insistence that education must be relational. It must respond to context, not abstract targets.

STEM, gender and the confidence gap

One of the not-often-discussed revolutions in girls’ education today is not enrolment, but aspiration. Even when girls remain in school, they are often nudged away from mathematics, science and technology, not by ability, but by expectation.

Savitribai Phule rejected this logic outright. She argued that denying girls access to knowledge was a deliberate political act, not a natural outcome. Today, programmes that use activity-based learning to demystify STEM subjects are rediscovering this insight.

Smile Foundation’s recent work in strengthening STEM education in government schools through hands-on, activity-based models is particularly relevant here. By focusing on problem-solving rather than rote performance, these interventions help girls experience competence early. Confidence, once built, compounds.

This matters because the future of work, climate adaptation and public health will depend on scientific literacy. Excluding girls from these domains is not just unjust. It is economically irrational.

The global relevance of a local radical

Savitribai Phule is often framed as a national icon. That framing is too small.

Her work belongs alongside global histories of feminist education, abolitionist pedagogy, and anti-colonial thought. Like Mary McLeod Bethune or Paulo Freire, she understood education as a site of struggle. She rejected neutrality. She insisted that schools must choose sides.

In an era where education is increasingly instrumentalised as workforce preparation, Savitribai’s vision offers a corrective. She reminds us that learning is not only about employability, but about the capacity to resist injustice, imagine alternatives and act collectively.

Internationally, as countries debate girls’ education in conflict zones, climate-vulnerable regions, and digital economies, her insights resonate deeply. Access without agency is not empowerment. Schooling without safety is not progress.

What it means to honour her legacy

Commemorating Savitribai Phule should not be limited to statues or curriculum mentions. It requires institutional courage.

It means designing education systems that acknowledge care work, health and mental wellbeing as integral to learning. It means funding the unglamorous labour of counselling, mentorship and community mediation. It means trusting girls with complexity, not protecting them into silence.

Organisations like Smile Foundation demonstrate what this looks like in practice. But the responsibility cannot rest with civil society alone. States must invest in these invisible architectures of support or risk repeating the same failures under new slogans.

Savitribai Phule knew that educating a girl was never just about her future. It was about what kind of society dared to imagine her as equal.

Nearly two centuries later, that question remains unresolved.

Health

Reimagining India’s Health Future Through the Care Economy

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date January 2, 2026
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Health NGOs: Partnering for Better Healthcare Delivery

India’s health conversation is decisively changing. For decades, policy and philanthropy have focused on access: building hospitals, expanding insurance, increasing doctor counts, delivering medicines. These efforts have mattered. However, the most pressing health challenges India faces today—chronic disease, ageing, mental distress, disability, maternal and adolescent health—cannot be solved by clinical care alone. They require something more diffuse, more continuous and more human: care.

A recent Primus Partners report estimates that India’s care economy could grow into a USD 300 billion sector and generate over 60 million jobs by 2030. This includes childcare, eldercare, disability support, rehabilitation, mental health services, wellness, palliative care, and long-term community health support. What the report captures, beyond the headline numbers, is a structural shift already underway. Health delivery is moving out of hospitals and into homes, schools, workplaces and communities. Care, not treatment, is becoming the first mile of health.

This shift has profound implications for how India thinks about health systems, livelihoods, gender equity and social infrastructure. It also reframes the role of organisations working at the grassroots, including Smile Foundation, whose health programmes have long operated in precisely these spaces where care is lived rather than prescribed.

Why India’s health future depends on care

India is undergoing three simultaneous transitions. The first is demographic. By 2031, over 100 million Indians will be above the age of 70. The second is epidemiological. Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, respiratory illness and mental health conditions now account for a majority of the disease burden. The third is social. Urbanisation, migration and the breakdown of extended family structures are reducing the availability of informal care within households.

Together, these shifts are stretching a hospital-centric health system beyond its limits. Clinics can diagnose and treat, but they cannot ensure medication adherence, nutritional recovery, mobility, emotional support or dignity in ageing. These functions fall to caregivers, often women, who operate invisibly, informally and without recognition.

The Primus Partners report identifies 13 care personas across skill levels, from community health aides and elder sitters to rehabilitation assistants, counsellors and palliative care workers. What is striking is not the novelty of these roles, but how long they have existed without being named, skilled, or valued. India’s care economy already employs an estimated 36 million people, most of them women, most of them informal, and most of them poorly paid.

Recognising care as economic infrastructure rather than welfare expenditure is therefore not only a moral imperative, but a pragmatic one. Care work is labour-intensive, locally delivered, resilient to automation and deeply linked to health outcomes. Investing in it addresses unemployment, gender inequity and healthcare access simultaneously.

From episodic care to continuous support

Public health experts increasingly argue that the success of health systems will be measured not by the number of hospital beds, but by how well people live between medical visits. This is where care becomes decisive.

Consider anaemia among adolescent girls. Clinical guidelines emphasise iron supplementation, but evidence shows that compliance remains low without counselling, follow-up, nutrition education and family engagement. Or consider diabetes. A prescription is only effective if accompanied by dietary changes, monitoring, physical activity and emotional support. In mental health, the gap is even starker. India’s shortage of psychiatrists cannot be solved without trained community-level counsellors and peer support systems.

Care fills these gaps. It operates through trust, proximity and continuity. It requires skills that are not always clinical, but are no less specialised: listening, observation, counselling, behaviour change communication and cultural sensitivity.

Smile Foundation’s health programmes have, in practice, been delivering this form of care for years. Mobile healthcare units under Smile on Wheels do not merely provide diagnostics; they create follow-up pathways for patients who would otherwise fall out of the system. Community health workers and programme staff spend time explaining conditions, counselling families and ensuring that treatment is understood and sustained. Nutrition interventions combine supplementation with behaviour change communication. Women’s health initiatives integrate menstrual health, anaemia prevention and adolescent counselling rather than treating them as isolated issues.

Care as a source of dignified livelihoods

The care economy is also a jobs story, and a deeply gendered one. Women form the backbone of care work in India, both paid and unpaid. Yet this labour remains undervalued, informal and often invisible in economic planning.

Formalising care roles through skilling, certification, and career pathways has the potential to transform this landscape. As Prof. Sanjay Zodpey of the Public Health Foundation of India has argued, care delivery is increasingly shifting from hospitals to homes. Without a trained care workforce, health outcomes will stagnate even as costs rise.

Smile Foundation’s approach to health and livelihoods sits at this intersection. Through its skill development programmes, the organisation has begun to recognise health-adjacent roles as viable livelihood pathways. Community health facilitators, outreach workers, nutrition educators and health aides acquire skills that are transferable across programmes and geographies. When combined with certification frameworks and partnerships with public systems, these roles can evolve into formal employment within the care economy.

This matters not only for employment numbers, but for dignity. Care work, when recognised and fairly compensated, allows workers to move out of precarity and into stable livelihoods while performing socially essential labour.

Technology, but not without touch

Digital health has expanded rapidly in India, from telemedicine platforms to health apps and AI-driven diagnostics. These tools are necessary, but insufficient. Technology can extend reach, but it cannot replace trust.

The future of care lies in hybrid models where technology supports human care rather than displacing it. Digital records can improve continuity. Teleconsultations can reduce travel burdens. Decision-support tools can enhance frontline worker capacity. But the work of persuasion, reassurance, follow-up and empathy remains human.

Smile Foundation’s programmes illustrate this balance. Technology is used to improve efficiency and monitoring, but delivery remains anchored in physical presence. Mobile units reach remote areas. Community workers engage households. Schools and Anganwadi centres become sites of health education and screening. This integration of tech and touch is likely to define effective care models in the coming decade.

One of the most important insights from the care economy discourse is that health outcomes are inseparable from social protection. Illness pushes households into poverty not only through medical costs, but through lost income and unpaid caregiving burdens.

A care-centric health strategy must therefore align with social protection systems. Insurance schemes, nutrition programmes, disability support and elder pensions need to be designed with care delivery in mind. Community-based organisations play a critical role in translating policy into practice, identifying gaps and ensuring last-mile delivery.

Smile Foundation’s work across health, nutrition, education, and women’s empowerment positions it uniquely within this ecosystem. Health interventions are linked to livelihoods, education and gender equity rather than treated in isolation. This integrated approach reflects an understanding that care is not a sector, but a system.

A forward-looking agenda for 2030

If India is to realise the promise of its care economy, several shifts are required.

First, care must be embedded into health planning, not treated as an informal supplement. This means investing in community-level care roles, standardising training and integrating them into public health systems.

Second, care workers must be recognised as skilled professionals. Certification, fair wages and social security are essential not only for worker welfare, but for service quality.

Third, data systems must capture care. What is not measured is not valued. Tracking care delivery, outcomes and workforce participation is critical for policy design.

Finally, care must be seen as a shared responsibility. Governments, private sector actors, civil society and families all have roles to play.

Smile Foundation’s health programme, viewed through this lens, is not merely a service delivery model. It is an early expression of what a care-centred health system could look like in India. One that values proximity over prestige, continuity over episodic intervention and people over infrastructure alone.

As India looks towards 2030, the question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in care. It is whether we can afford not to.

Smile Insights

From Access to Agency: India’s Development Priorities in 2026

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date January 1, 2026
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For more than two decades, India’s development story has been shaped by a single, urgent imperative: access. Access to schools, access to healthcare, access to food, access to sanitation, access to jobs. This focus was necessary. Large sections of the population were excluded from basic services, and the moral clarity of closing those gaps drove policy, philanthropy and civil society action.

But as India enters 2026, the limits of an access-first approach are becoming increasingly clear.

Children are enrolled in schools, but many are not learning. Health facilities exist, but people arrive too late or too inconsistently. Nutrition schemes deliver calories, but not always nourishment. Skills programmes train millions, but transitions to stable work remain fragile. In short, access has expanded faster than outcomes.

This is not a failure of intent or effort. It is a signal that India’s development challenge has evolved.

The next phase is not about building more doors. It is about ensuring that people can walk through them, stay inside and emerge with real capability. That shift, from access to agency, will define the country’s social and economic resilience in the years ahead.

When access stops being enough

India’s progress on headline indicators is undeniable. School enrolment rates are high. Institutional deliveries have increased. Social protection coverage has widened. Digital platforms have improved service reach. Yet across sectors, a slightly disturbing pattern is visible.

Learning gaps persist well into secondary school. Preventable health conditions become chronic because of late detection. Adolescent girls drop out not because schools do not exist, but because the environment does not accommodate their bodies, safety or responsibilities. Workers trained for one role struggle to adapt when labour markets shift.

These outcomes share a common feature. The system technically reaches people, but does not consistently support them through the complexity of real life.

Agency is what bridges that gap. It is the ability to make informed choices, sustain participation, and adapt to change. Without it, access becomes episodic and fragile. With it, access becomes transformative.

Adolescence as the hinge point

One of the clearest lessons emerging from recent development research and field experience is the centrality of adolescence. The years between roughly 10 and 19 determine trajectories across education, health, gender equality and employment. Yet policy and programming often treat this phase as a transitional afterthought, wedged between early childhood and adulthood.

This is a costly oversight which will hurt all us in 2026.

Educational disengagement accelerates during these years. Mental health challenges often first appear. Nutritional deficits become entrenched. Gender norms harden. Digital exposure intensifies. Early work and caregiving responsibilities begin to displace learning.

Crucially, these risks are cumulative. A girl who struggles with anaemia is more likely to disengage from school. A boy who drops out early is more vulnerable to unstable work. A young person without psychosocial support is less equipped to navigate economic shocks later.

Agency in adolescence is not about independence alone. It is about systems that recognise vulnerability, provide continuity and allow young people to remain present in education, health care and skill-building without constant interruption.

Quality as the new equity frontier for 2026

For much of India’s development journey, equity was framed as inclusion. Who is in school. Who receives services, and who is counted. Today, equity increasingly hinges on quality.

Two children may attend school, but one has access to trained teachers, safe sanitation, digital tools, and supportive peers, while the other does not. Two adolescents may be enrolled in skilling programmes, but only one receives mentorship, exposure to real workplaces and pathways to progression.

These differences compound over time. They shape confidence, aspiration and resilience. They determine who can recover from setbacks and who cannot.

Quality is not an abstract concept. It is built through teacher support, curriculum relevance, mental health integration, nutrition awareness and safe infrastructure. It requires investment in people, not only in platforms.

Civil society organisations working at the grassroots have increasingly encountered this reality. Programmes that combine academic learning with life skills, health screening with counselling or vocational training with mobility support tend to produce more durable outcomes than single-focus interventions.

Gender as a systems issue

Another shift underway is how gender is understood within development practice. Gender is no longer only about participation numbers or standalone women-focused schemes. It is increasingly recognised as a systems issue.

Girls’ education falters not only because of poverty, but because of sanitation gaps, safety concerns, household labour expectations and lack of health support during adolescence. Women’s workforce participation is constrained not only by skills, but by unpaid care work, mobility and workplace design. Health outcomes are shaped by gendered access to nutrition, rest and decision-making.

Addressing these challenges requires moving beyond siloed programmes. It demands integrated responses that acknowledge how education, health, nutrition and livelihoods intersect in women’s lives.

Organisations like Smile Foundation have increasingly oriented their work around this understanding. Education initiatives are linked with adolescent health and nutrition. Skilling programmes are designed alongside community engagement and gender awareness. Healthcare outreach recognises the social conditions that shape treatment adherence.

This approach does not dilute focus. It strengthens it by aligning interventions with lived reality.

From service delivery to system strengthening

One of the most significant evolutions in India’s development landscape is the gradual shift from service delivery to system strengthening. This does not mean withdrawing from direct work. It means using direct work to improve how systems function.

In education, this includes supporting government schools with teacher training, curriculum tools and classroom practices that encourage participation rather than rote learning. In health, it means prioritising screening, early detection and referral continuity rather than episodic treatment. In skilling, it involves aligning training with local labour markets and ensuring post-training support.

This orientation recognises a simple truth. Sustainable change cannot rely on parallel structures indefinitely. It must improve the institutions people already depend on.

The role of civil society, in this context, in 2026 will not to replace the state or the market, but to bridge gaps, pilot models and humanise implementation.

Resilience over repair

Another lesson shaping 2026 priorities is the importance of resilience. India faces overlapping pressures from climate variability, labour market shifts and demographic change. These shocks do not arrive one at a time. They accumulate.

Resilient systems are those that reduce vulnerability before crises occur. This includes nutritional security that prevents long-term health damage, mental health support that mitigates distress before it becomes disabling and skill pathways that allow workers to adapt rather than exit the workforce entirely.

Preventive investment often lacks visibility. Its success is measured in problems that do not escalate. Yet evidence consistently shows that prevention yields higher returns than late-stage intervention.

Smile Foundation’s health and nutrition programmes increasingly reflect this logic. Mobile health units focus on early screening. Nutrition initiatives integrate local food systems with supplementation. Education programmes embed psychosocial support. These are not add-ons but structural choices.

What 2026 demands

If 2025 clarified the limits of access-driven development, 2026 must be the year India embraces capability as its core metric.

This requires asking different questions. Not only how many children are enrolled, but how many can read, reason and persist. Not only how many women are trained, but how many remain employed and mobile. Not only how many services exist, but how consistently people can use them.

It also requires patience. Agency cannot be delivered quickly. It is built through trust, continuity and responsiveness.

For policymakers, this means designing programmes that account for human behaviour, not just administrative efficiency. For civil society, it means resisting the temptation to chase scale without depth. For corporate partners, it means aligning CSR with long-term outcomes rather than short-term visibility.

India’s development challenge is no longer one of reach alone. It is one of readiness. The ability of people to stay engaged, adapt, and exercise choice will determine whether the country’s demographic advantage becomes a dividend or a liability.

The shift from access to agency is not a rejection of what came before. It is its logical continuation. And it may be the most important transition India makes this decade.

Health

India’s Anaemia Strategy Is Entering a निर्णायक Moment

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date December 31, 2025
No Comments on India’s Anaemia Strategy Is Entering a निर्णायक Moment

Adolescent nutrition should be at the heart of India’s development agenda

For decades, India has treated anaemia as a problem of supply. More iron tablets. More fortified food and more schemes layered onto an already crowded nutrition architecture. But the numbers have barely budged. According to NFHS-5, over 57 per cent of Indian women and nearly 60 per cent of adolescent girls are anaemic — figures that have remained stubbornly high despite years of programme expansion.

What has been missing is not intent, but design.

A recent cluster-randomised trial conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research–National Institute of Nutrition (ICMR-NIN) in Telangana may finally offer the clearest empirical signal yet that India’s anaemia response needs a structural reset. Published in BMJ Global Health, the study evaluates a population-wide Screen and Treat for Anaemia Reduction (STAR) strategy — and its implications go well beyond supplementation.

What the STAR trial changes

The STAR model departs from India’s prevailing approach in one critical way: it assumes that anaemia cannot be addressed effectively without first being identified, at scale, and in real time.

Conducted across 14 villages in Telangana, the study compared routine care under existing national programmes with a proactive, community-level screening and doorstep treatment strategy. Over 6,100 individuals aged six months to 50 years were screened using portable point-of-care haemoglobin analysers. Treatment was tailored: therapeutic iron–folic acid (IFA) doses for those with anaemia, and prophylactic doses for those without, aligned with national guidelines.

The results are difficult to ignore.

Among adolescent girls aged 10–19 years, anaemia prevalence declined by 15.3 percentage points, with mean haemoglobin levels increasing by 0.73 g/dL. Women of reproductive age also saw measurable gains, with a 4.4 percentage point reduction in anaemia prevalence. Overall anaemia prevalence in intervention clusters fell to 29.6 per cent, compared to 32.5 per cent in control areas.

In a policy landscape often dominated by modelling and assumptions, this is rare: direct, population-level evidence that proactive screening outperforms opportunistic, facility-based care.

Why current programmes plateau

India’s flagship Anaemia Mukt Bharat strategy has expanded coverage across age groups, but its architecture remains largely prophylactic and episodic. Screening is often limited to pregnant women or conducted opportunistically when individuals access health facilities. This approach misses precisely those groups most at risk: adolescents, out-of-school girls and women whose daily labour leaves little time for clinic visits.

High-impact global research has long warned against this gap. Analyses in The Lancet Global Health and BMJ show that iron deficiency explains only about half of anaemia cases among women in low- and middle-income countries. Chronic inflammation, repeated infections, micronutrient interactions and cumulative dietary inadequacy account for the rest. Without systematic detection, these cases remain invisible.

The STAR trial demonstrates that anaemia is not failing to respond because interventions are ineffective, but because they are poorly targeted.

The compliance paradox

The study also surfaces a crucial constraint. Despite doorstep delivery and behaviour change communication, adherence to IFA remained modest — 32 per cent for therapeutic doses and 47.5 per cent for prophylactic doses.

This finding aligns with a growing body of evidence in Public Health Nutrition and Social Science & Medicine that supplementation alone cannot overcome social, sensory, and behavioural barriers. Side effects, misconceptions, gender norms and competing priorities all shape adherence. Screening identifies anaemia; sustained engagement determines whether treatment works.

In other words, testing is necessary but not sufficient.

Anaemia as a life-course condition

What the STAR model implicitly recognises — and what policy has been slow to accept — is that anaemia is a life-course condition, not a pregnancy-specific one.

By adolescence, many Indian girls have already accumulated years of nutritional deficit. Menstrual blood loss, growth spurts, early marriage and closely spaced pregnancies further deplete iron stores. Research in Nature Reviews Disease Primers underscores that late intervention cannot fully reverse the neurocognitive and metabolic effects of early deficiency.

This is why upstream platforms matter. Schools, community centres and mobile health units offer continuity that antenatal clinics cannot. They also allow anaemia to be addressed alongside nutrition literacy, menstrual health, and dietary diversity — factors that shape long-term outcomes.

Where civil society fits in

The policy implication of STAR is not merely to scale screening, but to embed it within trusted delivery platforms. This is where civil society organisations become system enablers rather than parallel providers.

Smile Foundation, for instance, operates at precisely this intersection. Across its health programme, the Foundation integrates regular haemoglobin screening with counselling, dietary diversification and menstrual health education, particularly for adolescent girls.

Through initiatives such as Project Poshan and Swabhiman, Smile Foundation follows girls longitudinally, recognising that anaemia prevention requires repeated engagement across life stages. Its mobile health units extend screening and counselling to tribal and peri-urban areas where laboratory access is limited, operationalising a “screen and treat” approach in contexts the public system struggles to reach.

Equally important is the Foundation’s emphasis on food-based solutions. Nutri-gardens, locally sourced meals and promotion of iron-rich traditional foods complement fortified products rather than replacing them. This mirrors findings from The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and Food Policy, which caution against over-reliance on ultra-processed fortified foods without broader dietary diversity.

Anaemia as an economic constraint

The persistence of anaemia is a productivity constraint.

Economic analyses published in The Review of Economics and Statistics link anaemia to reduced cognitive performance, lower educational attainment, and diminished lifetime earnings. The World Bank estimates that anaemia can cost high-burden countries up to 4 per cent of GDP annually through lost productivity and increased healthcare expenditure.

For adolescents, the consequences are immediate: poor concentration, fatigue and higher dropout risk. For women, anaemia reduces work capacity and increases vulnerability to economic shocks. Addressing anaemia, therefore, is not only a nutritional imperative but a macroeconomic one.

What scaling STAR would require

The STAR trial offers proof of concept, not a turnkey solution. Scaling it nationally would require:

Integration with existing platforms, including schools, Anganwadi centres and digital health systems under Ayushman Bharat.
Frontline capacity building, so screening and counselling are not reduced to mechanical tasks.
Data continuity, enabling haemoglobin tracking across life stages rather than one-time measurements.
Behavioural investment, recognising that adherence depends as much on trust and norms as on access.

Most importantly, it would require a shift in how success is measured. Tablets distributed are not outcomes. Functional gains are.

A decisive moment

India has reached a point where the evidence is no longer ambiguous. The STAR trial confirms what researchers have argued for years: anaemia cannot be reduced at scale without proactive identification and continuous engagement.

The choice now is whether to treat this finding as another pilot success, or as a mandate to redesign national strategy. If India opts for the latter, the gains will extend far beyond haemoglobin levels. They will be felt in classrooms where girls can concentrate, in workplaces where women can perform at full capacity, and in households where health is no longer silently traded for survival.

Anaemia has endured not because it is intractable, but because it has been approached too narrowly. STAR shows what is possible when policy finally aligns with physiology, behaviour and systems.

Education

STEM Reform: When Science becomes Something Students can Touch

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date December 30, 2025
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STEM Learning

In a government school classroom in Siddharthnagar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, a group of Class 7 students cluster around a simple experiment. There is no laboratory, no expensive equipment. Instead, there are measuring scales, cardboard cut-outs, water bottles and notebooks dotted with rough calculations. The lesson is not about memorising a formula. It is about understanding why a pulley reduces effort, or how fractions behave when translated into real objects rather than symbols on a blackboard.

For many of these students, this is the first time mathematics and science feel real.

This shift from recitation to experimentation sits at the heart of a growing global consensus: children do not learn science by listening to it. They learn it by doing it.

Across education systems worldwide, STEM has become a policy priority, yet classrooms continue to rely on pedagogies that actively push students away from science and mathematics. India’s challenge is particularly stark. Despite near-universal enrolment at the elementary level, learning outcomes in maths and science in government schools remain low by the time students reach adolescence.

The problem is not curriculum overload alone. It is the way knowledge is delivered.

The global evidence for activity-based learning

Decades of research show that activity-based and inquiry-led learning leads to stronger conceptual understanding than traditional lecture-driven instruction. A landmark meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that students in active learning STEM classrooms were significantly less likely to fail than those taught through lectures alone (PNAS, 2014).

Importantly, this evidence is not limited to high-income countries. Studies in low- and middle-income contexts, including research published in World Development and Comparative Education Review, show that hands-on pedagogy improves comprehension and retention even in resource-constrained classrooms. What matters most is not technology or infrastructure, but pedagogy.

This becomes critical during the middle-school years. Between Classes 6 and 8, students encounter abstraction in mathematics and science for the first time. Without conceptual grounding, many disengage permanently. For girls, this disengagement is compounded by social norms, confidence gaps and the absence of visible STEM role models.

UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (2023) notes that while girls perform on par with boys in science at the primary level, participation drops sharply in adolescence, particularly in rural and low-income settings. The reasons are rarely cognitive. They are structural, social and pedagogical.

India’s learning crisis is not a curriculum crisis

India’s National Education Policy 2020 recognises these issues. It calls for experiential learning, critical thinking and reduced content load. Yet policy intent has struggled to translate into classroom practice.

Teachers in government schools are often expected to deliver ambitious reforms with limited training, overcrowded classrooms and few teaching aids. Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) data repeatedly shows that by Class 8, fewer than half of students can solve basic division or apply foundational scientific reasoning. These are not failures of ability. They are failures of instruction.

Activity-based learning directly addresses this gap. Instead of positioning the teacher as the sole authority, it invites students to test, question and collaborate. Mistakes become part of the learning process rather than a source of shame. This matters deeply in classrooms where fear of being wrong dominates participation.

Why hands-on STEM matters especially for girls

For girls, the stakes are higher. Research published in Nature Human Behaviour and Educational Research Review consistently shows that confidence, rather than competence, is the primary barrier to girls’ continued participation in STEM. Classrooms that reward speed and public correctness tend to silence students who are socialised to avoid visible error.

Activity-based learning shifts this dynamic. Group experiments and problem-solving tasks reduce the psychological distance between girls and STEM subjects. A 2022 review in Educational Research Review found that inquiry-based STEM instruction significantly improved girls’ self-efficacy and interest in science, even when test-score gains were modest.

Over time, these shifts matter. Attitudes shape aspiration, and aspiration shapes persistence.

From pilot projects to system strengthening

Against this backdrop, Smile Foundation’s introduction of a STEM Activity Handbook for Classes 6 to 8 in Siddharthnagar under its education intervention reflects a system-strengthening approach rather than a one-off intervention. Developed in collaboration with the District Education Administration, the handbook helps teachers translate abstract curriculum concepts into hands-on classroom activities using locally available materials.

The emphasis is not on replacing the syllabus, but on reinterpreting it. Each activity aligns with prescribed learning outcomes while offering structured guidance for experimentation, discussion and reflection. This is critical because one of the biggest barriers to pedagogical reform is teacher confidence. Without practical tools, calls for experiential learning remain aspirational.

The handbook also places deliberate emphasis on encouraging girls’ participation in STEM classrooms. By designing activities that reward collaboration, reasoning and curiosity rather than rote recall, it creates space for girls to engage meaningfully with mathematics and science.

Global evidence supports this approach. Research from the OECD and Brookings Institution shows that gender gaps in STEM narrow significantly in classrooms that prioritise inquiry, teamwork and problem-solving over competitive testing.

The formal launch of the handbook by the district’s Basic Education Officer matters not as ceremony, but as signal. When district administrations endorse pedagogical change, it moves activity-based learning from the margins to the mainstream.

Teachers remain central to STEM reform

Activity-based learning does not diminish the role of teachers. It reshapes it. Teachers become facilitators, guides and observers rather than mere transmitters of information.

This transition requires sustained support. Research published in Teaching and Teacher Education shows that successful adoption of inquiry-based pedagogy depends on continuous professional development, peer learning and classroom-ready resources. One-off workshops rarely change practice.

Smile Foundation’s broader education work reflects this insight by embedding teacher support into its interventions. By offering structured tools instead of abstract directives, it reduces the cognitive and logistical burden on teachers already working under pressure.

The danger of getting STEM reform wrong

There is a risk in equating STEM reform with technological fixes alone. Tablets and smartboards, while useful, cannot substitute for conceptual understanding. Without pedagogical change, technology simply digitises rote learning.

Activity-based learning offers a corrective. It reframes STEM education not as early job training, but as the cultivation of curiosity, reasoning and confidence. These capacities matter as much for democratic citizenship as for future employment.

The World Bank’s World Development Report (2018) made this clear: the skills most needed for the future of work are adaptability, problem-solving and the ability to learn continuously. Activity-based learning builds these foundations early.

The transformation of STEM education in India’s government schools will not come from headline-grabbing reforms alone. It will come from quieter shifts in classroom practice that make learning participatory rather than punitive.

The experience in Siddharthnagar offers a glimpse of what is possible when policy intent meets pedagogical realism. A handbook may appear modest in scale, but in classrooms where science has long been reduced to chalk and talk, it can change how students see themselves as learners.

For girls, these changes are especially consequential. When classrooms invite them to experiment, question and lead, futures in STEM become imaginable rather than abstract.

The evidence is clear. Activity-based learning works. The real question is whether India is willing to invest in the slow, relational work required to make it stick. In a system often driven by speed and scale, depth may be the more radical reform.

Gender

When Girls Learn, Generations Change

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date December 29, 2025
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Girls laughing while making their way to schools

In the years following Independence, schooling for girls in India was rarely unconditional. Families often allowed daughters into classrooms as long as education did not interfere with domestic responsibilities, social norms or expectations around marriage. Adolescence frequently marked the end of this fragile arrangement. Puberty, distance to school or household pressure became reasons enough for withdrawal. For many girls, education was not a right but a privilege that could be revoked.

Seven decades later, the country has made undeniable progress. Primary enrolment among girls is now nearly universal. The more difficult challenge, however, lies in retention. It is during adolescence that India continues to lose a large share of its girls from the education system. These exits are rarely abrupt or dramatic. More often, they are quiet and cumulative, shaped by everyday institutional failures rather than singular events.

The reasons girls stop attending school are well documented. Data from the National Family Health Survey shows that adolescent girls who drop out do so largely not to earn wages but to shoulder household responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and caregiving. Education beyond Class 8 remains inaccessible in much of rural India. Only a small proportion of rural schools offer secondary education, requiring girls to travel long distances, often on foot, along routes families consider unsafe. Transport costs, where available, add another layer of financial strain.

Early marriage remains a decisive factor in several states, particularly Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Once married, girls are far less likely to return to school. The loss is permanent, not temporary. This pattern continues despite legal safeguards, highlighting the limits of policy in the absence of supportive social infrastructure.

Another barrier, less visible but equally powerful, is menstruation. Multiple studies show that lack of information, absence of clean and functional toilets, limited access to sanitary products and deep-rooted stigma contribute directly to absenteeism and dropout. An estimated 2.3 crore girls in India are at risk of discontinuing school after menarche. The problem is not biology but design. Schools often fail to accommodate a normal stage of adolescent development, signalling to girls that their bodies are incompatible with public learning spaces.

These pressures intersect with mental health concerns. Adolescent girls, particularly in rural and low-income settings, report higher levels of anxiety, emotional distress and isolation. Yet counselling services and trusted support systems remain scarce within schools. Silence becomes the default response, not because the burden is light, but because it is poorly recognised.

The consequences of girls leaving school extend far beyond individual ambition. Education during adolescence plays a decisive role in shaping long-term outcomes for families and communities.

First, schooling delays premature adult roles. Adolescence is a critical period for cognitive, emotional and social development. The structure of school schedules, examinations and grade progression creates a socially recognised framework that postpones early marriage and full-time caregiving responsibilities. Without this framework, girls are more likely to be absorbed into adult roles before they are prepared for them.

Second, education stabilises households economically. Women who complete secondary and post-secondary education are more likely to access formal employment, earn higher wages and exercise greater control over household resources. Evidence consistently shows that women’s income is more likely to be invested in children’s nutrition, healthcare and education. These benefits compound across generations, creating durable gains in human development.

Third, schools function as sites of supervision and accountability. Attendance records, peer networks and teacher engagement make prolonged absence visible. This visibility is crucial for preventing child labour, early marriage and abuse. When girls leave school, they often exit institutional oversight altogether, making them more vulnerable to exploitation.

Finally, education redistributes power. Schooling equips girls with knowledge of rights, laws and civic institutions. Communities with higher levels of female education show greater participation in local governance, lower tolerance for violence and more equitable social norms. Education does not merely improve economic outcomes. It reshapes expectations about gender, authority and opportunity.

Public policy has rightly focused on expanding access. However, access alone does not guarantee continuity. The next phase of reform must address the conditions under which girls remain in school during adolescence.

This includes ensuring clean, private and functional toilets; consistent access to menstrual hygiene products; age-appropriate health and reproductive education; safe transport or residential facilities where required; and teachers trained to respond with sensitivity rather than silence. It also requires recognising adolescent mental health as integral to educational retention rather than treating it as a separate concern.

Civil society organisations have played an important role in addressing these gaps where public systems struggle to reach consistently. Smile Foundation’s work offers one example of how integrated approaches can improve outcomes. Through its gender and girl child programmes, the organisation combines schooling with health services, nutrition support, menstrual hygiene management, counselling and sustained community engagement. By addressing the reasons girls leave school rather than reacting after dropout occurs, such interventions strengthen retention.

Importantly, these programmes do not focus on girls alone. They work with teachers, parents and boys to normalise conversations around puberty, health and care. When boys are included in discussions around empathy and shared responsibility, classroom cultures shift. Stigma weakens not through instruction alone but through everyday practice.

India’s demographic future depends not simply on enrolling girls in school but on supporting them through adolescence. If schools continue to overlook girls’ safety, health and everyday realities, enrolment gains will continue to erode quietly. When girls learn, generations do change. Not through rhetoric but through systems that make learning possible, dignified and sustained over time.

Health

From 50 to Forever: What Healthy Ageing Really Means

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date December 28, 2025
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WHO defines healthy ageing as “the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age.” Watch here!

At its core, this definition is not about avoiding illness entirely or defying time. It is about ensuring that as people grow older, they retain the ability to do what they value, live independently and remain connected to the world around them.

Everyone has someone older in their life. For some, that relationship is a joy; for others, it can be more complicated. For older people, as well, it may be difficult to navigate routine tasks and feel dependent. Whether it’s building meaningful relationships, staying socially connected, supporting independence or offering professional care and services, each part plays a vital role in helping people age well. Healthy ageing means keeping your body and mind in shape so you can live life the way you want. Good health allows older people to do the things that matter to them, stay socially involved and continue contributing in various ways that benefit society. Poor health, on the other hand, can limit this involvement. It can also put a heavy strain on families, who may need to care for someone who was once active or may face serious financial pressure from healthcare costs.

Life spans are increasing, but those extra years are not always spent in good health. India is nearing a critical demographic milestone: by 2031, more than 100 million people will be 70 or older. A less obvious and potentially more powerful lever that we have largely overlooked is a clearer, more grounded understanding of what it truly means to age well. It means shaping midlife so later years remain active, independent and meaningful.

Why 50 is the real starting line

The fifties often arrive quietly. Muscle mass begins to decline, recovery from illness or exertion takes longer and small physical losses accumulate gradually. Many people dismiss these changes as inevitable or harmless. At the same time, there has been a worrying rise in coronary artery disease among younger adults, sometimes well before the age of 50. Once considered largely a condition of old age, cardiovascular disease is now appearing earlier, driven by sedentary lifestyles, poor diets, stress and unmanaged metabolic conditions.

This trend is not merely a medical concern but a warning. Habits formed or neglected in midlife tend to shape health trajectories decades later. The fifties represent a critical window in which preventive action can still reverse or slow decline. Physical activity, nutrition, stress management and regular health monitoring adopted at this stage can significantly reduce the risk of disability and dependency in later life. Healthy ageing does not require dramatic interventions, but it does demand intentionality before health consequences become harder to manage.

Healthy ageing means preserving your capacity

Healthy ageing means maintaining your abilities that expand your lifespan. The true sign of ageing gracefully is being able to walk confidently, think clearly, bounce back from illness and handle daily tasks without needing constant help. Too often, we see systems that focus solely on treating diseases, overlooking whether individuals can actually function in their daily lives.

It also means movement and strength

Healthy ageing starts with movement, that is, incorporating daily activities into your routine. Think about walking instead of driving for short trips, opting for the stairs, carrying your groceries or tending to your garden. These simple actions help maintain your balance, strength and confidence. They keep your joints flexible and your muscles ready to respond. Healthy ageing hinges on physical resilience, particularly muscle strength and balance. Keeping your muscles strong supports metabolic function and also helps prevent falls and speeds up recovery from illness.

And then there is nutrition as well

Nutrition is a cornerstone of ageing well. As the body ages, its nutritional needs change and deficiencies can have disproportionate effects on strength, immunity and cognition. Diets rich in fruits and vegetables provide essential micronutrients that reduce inflammation and support cellular health. Adequate protein intake is critical for maintaining muscle mass and preventing frailty. Hydration, often overlooked, plays a vital role in circulation, brain function and energy levels.

Conversely, diets high in sugar, salt and saturated fats can gradually undermine resilience. Poor nutrition accelerates muscle loss, weakens bones, worsens metabolic conditions and increases vulnerability to disease. Healthy ageing requires not restrictive eating, but mindful nourishment that supports long-term strength and vitality.

Healthy ageing means undergoing check-ups too

Annual health check-ups are actually the backbone of healthy ageing. Regular tests like blood pressure, blood sugar, vision and hearing help catch issues early, when there’s still time to make simple changes. As we age, many of us end up living with chronic conditions, and that’s completely normal. Healthy ageing means managing conditions like diabetes, arthritis or heart disease in a way that supports your daily life. Poorly managed issues can drain your energy, limit your movement and knock your confidence.

Healthy ageing means connection and engagement

Healthy ageing depends on staying curious and engaged with life. Learning new skills keeps the brain active and builds new neural pathways. Reading, puzzles, learning languages and playing music all help protect thinking, memory, and flexibility. Social connection may be the most underestimated part of healthy ageing. Regular contact with friends, family and community helps ease stress and protect mental health. Clubs, volunteering and shared interests remind us who we are beyond age or illness and offer support, purpose and a sense of belonging.

Conclusion

Living longer is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Living better is a challenge that requires collective action. Healthy ageing is not solely a personal responsibility; it is shaped by access to healthcare, supportive environments and social attitudes that recognise ageing as a stage of life with potential, not decline.

Ageism is built into our language, behaviours and institutions, often without us even realising it. When we start talking about it openly, we become more aware of how stereotypes damage health, restrict opportunities and reduce quality of life for people of all ages. Changing how we speak, challenging bias when it appears and creating workplaces, schools and services that genuinely value age diversity are small actions that go a long way towards healthy ageing. Living longer is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Living better is something we need to achieve.

To enhance the current healthcare framework and minimise personal health expenditures, the ‘Health Cannot Wait’ initiative by Smile Foundation is delivering quality healthcare services directly to at-risk communities. These efforts will significantly encourage individuals to focus on their health both now and as they grow older.

Smile

Poverty Gains at Risk Due to Climate Hazards

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date December 27, 2025
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The year 2013: monsoon did not arrive as expected in Maharashtra. Across almost 7,900 villages, fields cracked under the sun, wells ran dry and crops failed before harvest, leading to the region’s worst drought in 40 years. For thousands of small and marginal farmers, this meant that agriculture would no longer be a source of income but instead a source of debt. In the process, water scarcity deepened in the region weakening food security, eventually leading to disappearing livelihood options for rural poor communities.

The combination of rising heat, shifting rainfall, floods, droughts and other climate-induced shocks now endangers the livelihoods, food security and wellbeing of the poorest in our country and abroad, especially those whose lives remain tethered to climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, water and informal labour.

Climate-induced poverty is a massive, multidimensional challenge that disproportionately affects women, children and small farmers because they have fewer resources and limited capacity to adapt to climate shocks. In essence, climate poverty reveals that climate change is not merely an ‘environmental crisis’, but a ‘development and justice issue’, where those least responsible for global emissions bear the greatest economic and social costs.

Evidence from research

A recent district-level study covering 593 districts across 21 Indian states shows a strong statistical association between climate shocks and poverty. The research finds that variability in maximum temperature, flood-prone areas, drought risk in primary-sector-dependent regions, and erratic precipitation all significantly increase the probability of a district falling into a high-poverty bracket.

Another 2025 study that links climate exposure to multidimensional poverty reveals that every 1 °C rise in average temperature corresponds to a substantial increase in poverty incidence. This suggests that climate stressors affect more than just income: they also erode health, access to basic services and overall human development.

Such linkages are not unexpected or new. Households that have been dependent on natural-resource based livelihoods have always been vulnerable to natural variability. But with accelerating climate change, the frequency, intensity and unpredictability of climate hazards are increasing. Moreover, the poorest often have the least capacity to absorb shocks. They lack financial buffers, access to insurance or even alternative livelihoods. When disasters strike repeatedly, say in case of back-to-back droughts or floods, recovery becomes even harder, pushing many households deeper into poverty or making them displaced.

Reversal of poverty reduction

What this mounting evidence suggests is alarming: the decades of progress in reducing poverty and improving living standards, gains achieved through agricultural growth, rural development, welfare schemes, migration and expanding employment opportunities are under threat.

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Report 2025, released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in collaboration with the University of Oxford, underscores how the accelerating climate crisis is reshaping the geography of global poverty. While recent decades have witnessed unprecedented progress in reducing poverty, the report warns that these gains are increasingly fragile in the face of intensifying climate hazards. Of the 6.3 billion people assessed across 109 countries, an estimated 1.1 billion (nearly one in five) continue to live in acute multidimensional poverty. Strikingly, almost 79 per cent of them reside in areas exposed to at least one major climate threat, including extreme heat, drought, flooding or air pollution.

South Asia emerges as both a story of significant progress and growing vulnerability. In India, the proportion of people living in poverty declined sharply from 55.1 per cent in 2005 to 16.4 per cent in 2021, lifting an estimated 414 million people out of deprivation. Yet the report cautions that without urgent efforts to embed climate resilience into development planning, recurring climate shocks could erode these hard-won advances and push millions back into poverty.

Extreme heatwaves, for instance, already cost lives and livelihoods. A 2023 report warned that deadly heatwaves could undo progress on poverty, food security and inequality, by affecting crop production, wages and health of small farmers and poor households. In many tribal and drought/flood-prone districts of eastern and central India such as parts of Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and drought-affected zones in Maharashtra this combination of structural disadvantage and climate stress could aggravate poverty, inequality and social exclusion.

Towards a climate-resilient poverty alleviation strategy

Given these risks, policy responses and development strategies must be strengthened and implemented with urgency. A purely economic growth–centred approach is insufficient to address the deep and intersecting challenges posed by climate change. What is needed instead is a climate-sensitive, resilience-oriented framework that integrates poverty alleviation with climate adaptation and social protection.

This requires increased investment in drought-resistant crops, crop diversification, rainwater harvesting, soil conservation, agro-ecological practices, among others to make agriculture more climate-resilient in contemporary times. It also requires building climate-resilient infrastructure such as reliable water supply systems, irrigation networks, drainage and flood barriers while ensuring proper access to health care, education, and social safety nets that can cushion communities against climate shocks.

In addition, the government needs to introduce or expand climate-linked social protection schemes, including crop and livestock insurance, unemployment support, disaster relief and targeted assistance for vulnerable households such as smallholders, women-headed families and tribal communities. In a nutshell, it is essential to ‘recognise’ that climate hazards disproportionately affect marginalised groups and to design policies that are equitable, participatory and sensitive to local contexts.

Unless poverty-alleviation efforts adapt to climate realities, India risks losing not just economic gains but also human development and overall social stability for its people. Therefore, by recognising the interdependence of climate resilience and social development, we can safeguard the progress made over decades. In effect, tackling climate risks and fighting poverty need to be perceived as two sides of the same mission.

The role of civil society: Translating climate risk into resilience on the ground

While macro-level policies and public investments are essential to climate-resilient poverty alleviation, their effectiveness ultimately depends on how they translate into action at the community level.

Operating in drought-prone, flood-affected and agrarian regions across states such as Maharashtra, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and parts of central India, Smile Foundation’s programmes integrate livelihoods, nutrition, health, education and community resilience—recognising that climate poverty is inherently multidimensional.

In agriculture-dependent communities, the Foundation has supported climate-adaptive livelihood strategies by promoting crop diversification, kitchen and nutrition gardens, water conservation practices and skill-based alternatives to rain-fed farming. These interventions help households reduce dependence on a single, climate-sensitive income source and build buffers against income volatility caused by erratic rainfall or heat stress.

Health and nutrition programmes further address how climate stress exacerbates vulnerability. Extreme heat, water scarcity and food insecurity directly affect maternal health, child nutrition and disease burden. Through mobile health units and community-based nutrition initiatives, Smile Foundation extends preventive care and nutritional support to populations that often lose access during climate-induced disruptions such as droughts or floods. This is particularly relevant for women and children, who are disproportionately affected by climate-related health risks.

Education interventions form another layer of resilience. Climate shocks frequently disrupt schooling through migration, loss of livelihoods or infrastructure damage, increasing the risk of intergenerational poverty. By supporting continuity of learning through remedial education, scholarships and community learning centres, Smile Foundation helps prevent climate-induced dropouts ensuring that environmental shocks do not permanently derail human capital development.

Equally important is the organisation’s focus on community mobilisation and behavioural change. Climate adaptation is not only about infrastructure and technology, but also about awareness, preparedness and local agency. Through sustained engagement with women’s groups, farmers, adolescents and frontline workers, we support communities in understanding climate risks, accessing entitlements and adopting adaptive practices suited to their ecological and socio-economic context.

These ground-level experiences reinforce that climate resilience cannot be delivered through siloed interventions. Poverty alleviation efforts must simultaneously address income security, health, nutrition, education and social protection, especially in climate-exposed regions. Civil society organisations, by virtue of their proximity to communities, are well placed to pilot integrated models that can inform and complement public policy.

Closing bridge

Taken together, this evidence from national datasets to community-level experience underscores that climate change threatens to reverse poverty reduction not through a single shock, but through cumulative, overlapping stresses on livelihoods, health and human development. Safeguarding India’s progress requires that poverty alleviation and climate adaptation be treated not as parallel agendas, but as a unified development imperative.

By aligning public policy, social protection systems and community-led resilience efforts, India can protect its most vulnerable populations from climate-induced impoverishment. Tackling climate risks and fighting poverty are no longer sequential challenges—they are two sides of the same mission, and must be addressed together if development gains are to endure.

Nutrition

India’s Nutrition Future Must Be Both Scientific and Local

Post author By Smile Foundation
Post date December 26, 2025
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Close to 100 children from Katada village in Angul, Odisha are provided education and nutritious meals at Smile Foundation's Mission Education centre - Nari Suraksha Samiti.

India has largely solved one problem that once defined its development trajectory: the fear of mass hunger. Grain stocks are robust, procurement systems are entrenched and food-based welfare schemes reach millions of households every day. But India continues to rank poorly on nutrition indicators that matter for health, learning and productivity. The paradox is striking. The country is food-secure, but not nutrition-secure.

This contradiction lies at the heart of India’s current nutrition challenge. Hunger today is no longer only about empty stomachs. It is about diets that fill bellies but fail bodies. Micronutrient deficiencies, often described as “hidden hunger”, now coexist with undernutrition and rising obesity, creating what public-health experts call a triple burden of malnutrition.

Addressing this crisis requires moving beyond ideological debates and simplistic solutions. It demands an approach that recognises the value of scientific interventions such as food fortification, while simultaneously rebuilding local food diversity and dietary practices that have sustained Indian communities for generations. The future of India’s health lies not in choosing between the laboratory and the kitchen, but in learning how to use both wisely.

The scale of the India’s nutrition crisis

The data is unequivocal. According to NFHS-5, more than half of women of reproductive age in India are anaemic, as are nearly two-thirds of children under five. These deficiencies have long-term consequences: impaired cognitive development, lower educational attainment, reduced economic productivity and higher maternal and child mortality.

What makes this crisis particularly insidious is that it persists despite widespread calorie availability. Public programmes such as the Public Distribution System and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme have been effective in preventing starvation. But they were never designed to deliver dietary diversity at scale. Cereals dominate plates, while fruits, vegetables, pulses and animal-source foods remain limited, especially among low-income households.

This is not a failure of intent. It is a structural limitation of systems built to address hunger, not nutrition.

Food fortification as a public-health tool

In this context, food fortification has emerged as a pragmatic response. By adding essential micronutrients such as iron, folic acid, iodine and vitamin A to staple foods, fortification seeks to improve nutritional intake without requiring behavioural change.

From a public-health perspective, its appeal is clear. Fortification is scalable, cost-effective and capable of reaching populations that may otherwise be excluded from targeted interventions. International evidence suggests that fortification can significantly reduce anaemia, neural tube defects and iodine deficiency disorders when implemented correctly.

In India, fortified rice, wheat flour, edible oil and salt are increasingly integrated into welfare schemes. For populations with acute deficiencies, fortification acts as a nutritional safety net—one that can be deployed quickly and at scale.

But fortification has limits.

It can correct specific deficiencies, not replace the complex nutritional profile of a diverse diet. It cannot provide dietary fibre, phytochemicals or the full range of micronutrients found in whole foods. Nor can it address the social and behavioural dimensions of eating.

The case for local food diversity

India’s traditional diets evolved over centuries to reflect geography, climate and culture. Millets in semi-arid regions, leafy greens in riverine belts, fermented foods in the Northeast—these were not lifestyle choices but adaptive strategies for survival and health.

The erosion of these food systems has been gradual but profound. Market consolidation, agricultural monocropping, urbanisation and aggressive marketing of ultra-processed foods have narrowed dietary diversity. The result is a nutrition transition that has left low-income communities vulnerable to both deficiency and excess.

Local food diversity is not nostalgia. It is a sustainability strategy. Diets built around seasonal vegetables, pulses, millets and indigenous greens are more resilient to climate shocks, less dependent on global supply chains and nutritionally richer than cereal-heavy or processed diets.

Rebuilding this diversity requires institutional support through schools, Anganwadi centres and community systems that reconnects people with locally available foods and the knowledge to use them.

A false binary in India’s nutrition policy

Public debate often frames fortification and local diets as competing approaches. This is a false binary.

Fortification is most effective as a protective measure—a baseline intervention to prevent severe deficiency. Dietary diversity is the long-term solution for sustainable health. One addresses urgency; the other builds resilience.

The problem arises when fortification is treated as a substitute for food system reform, rather than as a complement. Over-reliance on fortified staples, especially when paired with ultra-processed foods, risks entrenching monotonous diets and undermining local agriculture.

The challenge for policymakers is not to choose sides, but to design nutrition strategies that integrate both approaches without allowing one to crowd out the other.

Lessons from field-based implementation

This balance is best observed at the community level, where civil society organisations working across nutrition, health and education often see that behaviour change, access and trust are as important as nutrient composition.

Smile Foundation’s health and education programmes offer one such example. Operating across multiple states, the Foundation sustains efforts to promote local food consumption through kitchen gardens, nutrition education and community engagement.

In districts where anaemia rates were high, fortified foods provided immediate relief. But long-term improvement was observed only when families began incorporating locally grown vegetables, greens and iron-rich foods into daily meals. Schools that established nutrition gardens not only diversified diets but also improved food literacy among children and caregivers.

The insight here is not about scale, but design. Nutrition interventions work best when they are layered, combining scientific inputs with local food systems and information with access.

The new challenge: ultra-processed diets

Even as undernutrition persists, India faces a growing problem of over-nutrition. Ultra-processed foods, often fortified but high in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, are increasingly common in urban and semi-urban diets.

This creates a perverse situation where a child can be both overweight and micronutrient-deficient. Fortification alone cannot resolve this contradiction. Without parallel efforts to promote whole foods and regulate unhealthy diets, nutrition policy risks addressing symptoms while deepening causes.

From food security to nutrition security

India’s next nutrition transition must therefore move beyond food security to nutrition security. This means rethinking how welfare schemes, agriculture, education and health systems interact.

Fortify where necessary. Diversify wherever possible. Protect vulnerable populations today, while rebuilding food systems for tomorrow.

A more grounded way forward

As climate change, urbanisation and economic inequality reshape India’s food landscape, the choices made today will determine whether the country improves health outcomes or locks itself into a cycle of nutritional inadequacy.

The path forward lies in recognising diversity as strength—not inefficiency—and science as ally, not replacement. Nutrition policy must resist one-size-fits-all solutions and instead build layered strategies that respond to both urgency and sustainability.

India does not need to choose between fortified rice and backyard greens. It needs both. The task is to ensure that neither becomes an excuse for neglecting the other.

Only then can the country move from feeding its population to nourishing it.

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Smile Foundation

161 B/4, 3rd Floor, Gulmohar House, Yusuf Sarai Community Centre New Delhi - 110049 Delhi, India

Contact Us: Tel: +91-11-43123700 | E-mail: info@smilefoundationindia.org

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A more grounded way forward

ABOUT US

OUR WORK

CAMPAIGNS

GET INVOLVED

RESOURCE CENTRE

Smile Foundation 161 B/4, 3rd Floor, Gulmohar House, Yusuf Sarai Community Centre New Delhi - 110049 Delhi, India Contact Us: Tel: +91-11-43123700 | E-mail: info@smilefoundationindia.org

Smile Foundation

161 B/4, 3rd Floor, Gulmohar House, Yusuf Sarai Community Centre New Delhi - 110049 Delhi, India

Contact Us: Tel: +91-11-43123700 | E-mail: info@smilefoundationindia.org