Poshan Atlas

At the request of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Harvard Chan and India Research Center have partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop India’s first Poshan Atlas (agro-food database) to encourage dietary diversity and control of non-communicable diseases like obesity and diabetes Led by Dr. Lindsay Jaacks, assistant professor of Global Health at Harvard Chan, the team will create the first-ever database in the world to link comprehensive information on what foods are traditionally consumed, what crop varieties are currently grown, and, given agroecological contexts (e.g. soil organic carbon content, ground water availability, etc.), guidance on how a greater diversity of crops could be encouraged in a particular district to promote dietary diversity and nutrition. While most data, particularly on agroecological contexts, will come from existing government sources, in order to collect information on food traditionally consumed, we will launch one of India’s biggest “citizen science” projects to date.