The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-6 is a comprehensive, multi-round, nationwide household survey conducted during 2023-2024 to provide high-quality, district-level data on population, health, nutrition, and family welfare indicators in India. The NFHS series originated with the first round in 1992-93 to generate reliable, comparable data for policy and program evaluation, addressing the need for a strong demographic and health database.
The NFHS-6 was conducted under the stewardship of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), with the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, serving as the nodal agency. For the first time, the IIPS solely coordinated all aspects of the survey, marking a shift from previous rounds that received technical assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The mechanism involved surveying approximately 6.79 lakh households across 715 districts and fully adopting Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) for real-time data validation.
The NFHS-6 expanded its scope from the previous NFHS-5 (2019-21) by adding new focus areas, including coverage of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), Self-Help Groups (SHGs), digital literacy, and digital financial transactions. It also expanded clinical, anthropometric, and biochemical (CAB) testing to include HIV testing. The data collected directly connects to the monitoring of national flagship programs like POSHAN Abhiyaan, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), and the Universal Immunization Programme (UIP), and helps track India's progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Key findings from NFHS-6 show improvements, such as institutional deliveries rising from 88.6% to 90.6% and child stunting declining from 35.5% to 29.3%.