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Ankur Garg: Safe Water and Nutrition as Economic Investments for LMIC Demographic Dividends

Ankur Garg/LinkedIn

Nov 1, 2026, 23:38

Ankur Garg: Safe Water and Nutrition as Economic Investments for LMIC Demographic Dividends

Ankur Garg, India Country Director and EVP at Evidence Action, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“As the latest World Bank poverty data got released, I was contemplating the case for safe water and good nutrition within LMIC policy circles is usually made with a health frame.

In a piece for Fortune earlier this month, I argued it is just as much an economic one.

Someone who stays home with a stomach illness, or a teenage girl too anaemic to concentrate in class, does not count in a GDP release.

Across millions of households, those absences add up.

A 2023 WHO assessment of the Jal Jeevan Mission estimates that safely managed drinking water for every household could avert nearly 400,000 diarrhoeal deaths and deliver savings of up to $101 billion.

Those gains depend on the water being safe at the tap, not only available.

As an additional data point, a meta-analysis led by Prof Michael Kremer finds that water treatment can reduce child mortality by roughly 20 per cent.

Evidence Action is providing technical assistance to national and several state government across India to support this important mission.

Nutrition follows the same logic, and the two are linked, since repeated gut infections stop children absorbing the nutrients they eat.

Estimates suggest that Iron deficiency anaemia in a single cohort of young children is estimated to cost India about $24 billion in lifetime lost productivity.

Prevention costs very little by comparison. School-based deworming runs at about ₹5 per child a year and iron and folic acid supplementation at about ₹48, with teachers delivering both through systems the government already runs. Our team has been a partner for National Deworming Day for over a decade.

India is moving in the right direction. Child stunting has fallen from 35.5 to 29.3 percent in NFHS-6, and states are rolling out an expanded Anemia Mukt Bharat which includes testing, tracking, treating and talking strategy.

That said, the demographic dividend pays out only if the workforce is healthy enough to realise it.

The next step is to treat water and nutrition spending as investment and to track the economic returns as rigorously as the health outcomes.”

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