India's NFHS-6 Data Signals a Shift From Hunger to Lifestyle Diseases

The findings of the latest round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), covering 2023-24, carry one central message: development does not remove health challenges, it changes their shape. Two decades ago, India's main public health worry was exclusion. Too few women held bank accounts, very few households had any health insurance, large numbers of women were undernourished, and many people lived outside the reach of maternal care. The NFHS is a large, periodic government household survey that tracks health, nutrition and family welfare indicators across rural and urban India, and its newest readings show that many of those old gaps are now closing.

Two big transitions stand out. The first is in financial protection against illness. Households with some form of health insurance rose from under 5 per cent in 2005-06 to 29 per cent in 2015-16 and 60 per cent in 2023-24. Strikingly, rural coverage at 62 per cent has slightly overtaken urban coverage at 56 per cent, reversing an old disadvantage. Government schemes such as Ayushman Bharat, alongside state-run insurance, have helped turn medical costs from a purely private family burden into a partly shared risk. The second transition is in women's agency: the share of women operating their own bank accounts jumped from 53 per cent in 2015-16 to 89 per cent in 2023-24, mobile-phone ownership among women rose from 46 per cent to 64 per cent, and use of hygienic menstrual products climbed from 58 per cent to 79 per cent. Tools like digital identity and direct benefit transfers (cash or subsidies paid straight into bank accounts) have let the state reach groups it once could not.

Yet the same progress has produced an unexpected problem. India is beating undernutrition but losing ground to over-nutrition. The share of women below normal Body Mass Index (BMI, a height-to-weight ratio used to flag undernutrition or obesity) fell from 36 per cent in 2005-06 to 20 per cent in 2023-24. Over the same years, however, overweight and obesity among women rose from 13 per cent to 31 per cent, and among men from 9 per cent to 27 per cent, with rural areas catching up fast. High blood sugar among women nearly doubled from 9 per cent in 2015-16 to 17 per cent in 2023-24. This mirrors the 'nutrition transition' earlier seen in China, Brazil and Mexico, where growth, processed food and less physical activity shifted the disease pattern toward heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Diabetes, once seen as an urban, well-off person's illness, is now spreading quickly into villages.

Maternal care shows a similar paradox. More hospital deliveries have cut maternal and infant deaths, but Caesarean-section births rose from 9 per cent nationally in 2005-06 to 27 per cent in 2023-24, reaching 54 per cent in private facilities. The World Health Organization holds that population-level Caesarean rates above roughly 10-15 per cent do not, by themselves, improve outcomes, raising questions about medical need, provider incentives and regulation. On the positive side, tobacco and alcohol use among men have fallen, showing that sustained awareness and rules can change behaviour. The broader lesson is that India must now fight 'diseases of affluence' with the same energy it brought to inclusion, investing in nutrition policy, preventive screening, food regulation and healthier urban design.

For exam preparation, this topic sits in the social-development and governance space tested by UPSC and State PCS, and supplies current-affairs material for SSC, banking and other exams. Candidates should remember the key NFHS-6 trends, the role of schemes such as Ayushman Bharat and Direct Benefit Transfer, the concept of the nutrition transition, BMI and the rise of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, and the WHO's benchmark on Caesarean rates, as these connect directly to questions on health policy, social indicators and human development.