Mobile health interventions: A policymakers’ note on the World’s largest Nutrition Surveillance in India

India’s first-generation and short-lived nutrition surveillance pilot (called ICDS-CAS) launched in 2018 was dismantled and replaced by a second-generation program (called POSHAN 2.0) in 2021. To estimate the relative effectiveness of 18 services provided by the frontline workers using ICDA-CAS, I approach its geographically phased-out pilot as a natural experiment, exploiting the quasi-random district-level assignment of ICDS-CAS and interventions. I access the publicly unavailable telephonic survey data collected during spring 2021 from the World Bank. It covers 1100 pregnant women and 3300 lactating mothers in 124 randomly sampled districts from 11 populous Indian states. I find that the adherence to recommended iron supplementation is 33 percentage points higher for pregnant women, who received information, messages, and counselling from the frontline health workers in districts which implemented ICDS-CAS. For lactating mothers, who attended a village health and nutrition day event, the impact on iron supplementation is 9 percentage points greater if they were residing in ICDS-CAS districts. The data suggests that the remaining interventions are not effective. Feature comparison of both the programs suggests that India’s second-generation nutrition surveillance is more diligently designed than its predecessor, hence more promising.