Beyond Average Treatment Effects: Distribution of Child Nutrition Outcomes and Program Placement in India's ICDS

The Indian Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) aims to improve child nutrition by providing nutritional supplements and pre- and post-natal services to targeted villages. However, previous evaluations find that ICDS fails to reduce malnutrition, and program placement does not uniformly target vulnerable areas. I use new data to reevaluate ICDS on several dimensions; in contrast to previous studies, I find significant treatment effects particularly for the most malnourished children. However, results suggest targeting does not work uniformly well: ICDS effectively targets poor areas, but fails to target areas with low levels of average education or those with unbalanced sex ratios. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.