New Delhi: The Indian School of Business (ISB) has announced a new partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture to strengthen agriculture-nutrition convergence. ISB, the University of Sheffield (UoS), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) will lead the collaboration . Speaking on the occasion, Shri Manoj Ahuja, Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, said, “The need to improve nutrition, particularly for the underprivileged population, is of prime importance.”
To address this pressing need, agricultural and nutrition policies and programmes must be brought together. ISB will anchor this collaboration in the MoA&FW, bolstering the government’s efforts to improve nutrition outcomes and strengthen agriculture-nutrition convergence while also establishing an institutional mechanism to identify convergence opportunities at both the central and local levels.
“The needle on nutrition in India has been difficult to move,” said Prof. Ashwini Chhatre, Executive Director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business (ISB). The collaboration will support the GoI’s efforts to create “long-term impact pathways to improve nutrition outcomes among the low-income population,” with a focus on nutrient-dense foods (NDFs) such as fruits and vegetables (F&Vs) and animal source foods (ASFs).
Over a five-year period, UoS, LHSTM, and ISB will collaborate with ISB’s implementation partners—CInI-TATA Trusts, MSC, and PDAG—to increase the accessibility, availability, and affordability of nutrient-dense foods for low-income populations in underserved areas through agriculture-nutrition policy convergence, so that improving nutrition outcomes among the target audience becomes a stable policy outcome over an extended time horizon.
“The collaboration will facilitate a framework for co-design and co-delivery of scalable, equitable, and sustainable interventions to improve the consumption of F&Vs and ASFs towards improving diet quality in India,” said Prof. Bhavani Shankar of the University of Sheffield.
