India's sixth National Family Health Survey, released on May 29, covered nearly 6.79 lakh households across 715 districts during 2023-24. Its comparison round is NFHS-5, conducted in 2019-21. The results combine rising adult weight and blood-sugar indicators with improvements in several measures of maternal and child health.
Among women aged 15-49, overweight or obesity increased from 24% to 30.7%; among men it rose from 22.9% to 27.3%, the Indian Express reported from the survey. The category combines overweight and obesity. It does not mean that three in ten women were classified as obese alone.
The geographical breakdown shows a substantial gap. Overweight or obesity affected 42.8% of urban women against 25.5% of rural women. The corresponding figures for men were 36.3% and 23%. The urban-rural difference was therefore 17.3 percentage points for women and 13.3 points for men, calculated from the reported shares.
A separate indicator covers people aged 15 and above with glucose above 140 mg/dl or taking medication to control it. It reached 17.8% for women and 20.9% for men. Urban shares were again higher: 21.9% against 16.2% for women, and 23.9% against 19.7% for men. This is not a count of new diabetes diagnoses.
The Health Ministry's release shows under-five stunting falling from 35.5% to 29.3% and severe wasting from 7.7% to 5.2%. Underweight changed much less, from 32.1% to 31.8%. Height for age, acute thinness and weight for age thus recorded different rates of improvement within the same survey comparison.
Maternal-care coverage also increased. First-trimester antenatal care rose from 70% to 76.2%, while at least four antenatal visits increased from 58.5% to 65.2%. Institutional deliveries reached 90.6%, up from 88.6%. These service-use measures describe access during pregnancy and childbirth, alongside the survey's separate measurements of nutritional status.
