Problem

School-age children are largely absent from national nutritional surveillance

• National

India's flagship nutrition survey, NFHS, measures children under five. Adolescent surveys pick up again later. School-age children between roughly five and eighteen — the population the school system actually serves and feeds — fall between the two, and peer-reviewed research has identified this explicitly as a data gap it was designed to fill. National nutrition policy is therefore informed disproportionately by under-five data. Evidence confidence: Medium-High — the gap is stated explicitly as the rationale of a peer-reviewed study; the specific district findings of that study should not be generalised nationally.