Fact check: Are “40 out of 100 children malnourished” in Gujarat?

Fact check reveals that around 40% of children in Gujarat are malnourished, particularly affecting tribal communities.

Child malnutrition in Gujarat became the subject of a debate in the Legislative Assembly on Thursday (March 12, 2026). During a discussion on the budgetary demands of the Women and Child Development Department, with Congress MLA Jignesh Mevani raised an issue saying, “Despite this BJP government with more than 150 seats and 28 years of rule, only one figure comes on record, that 40 out of 100 children are malnourished. A very large section of them are tribals.”

Women and Child Development Minister Manisha Vakil responded that the Opposition was relying on figures from the National Family Health Survey (2019-21) and asked members to “update your knowledge”. 

Ms. Vakil told the Assembly that, according to the Poshan Tracker system, “only 11.4% of children in Gujarat” were malnourished as of January 2026, and said this showed a sharp decline in recent years.

But the Poshan Tracker and NFHS use different methods and cannot be directly compared. NFHS is a sample-based household survey conducted on a representative population, while the Poshan Tracker is a real-time monitoring system under Mission Poshan 2.0 that records growth data for children registered at anganwadi centres. 

“There are several issues in using Poshan Tracker data to counter NFHS figures. Poshan Tracker is supposed to be a complete census of children attending or at least enrolled at anganwadis, we do not know how complete the information is. NFHS data on the other hand is supposed to be representative of the entire population (including children who do not go to anganwadis),” said Economist Reetika Khera. 

The two datasets cover different populations and use different methods and their figures are not strictly comparable.