A NEW MONTHLY SERIES in The Leaflet, under the Asia Collective on Women’s Nutrition (‘ACTION’), explores women’s nutrition through a socio-legal lens, drawing relevant examples and lessons from South Asia countries. It asks a question we have too long avoided: not whether law promises nutrition to women, but whether those promises reach them.
Sethi and Murira (2025) helped us recall that South Asia still hosts 114 million underweight girls and women (50 percent of the global burden), while a rise in overweight and obesity now also affects 20 percent of this group in the region. They emphasized the fundamentals, poor maternal nutrition perpetuates multigenerational cycles of malnutrition and is caused by interrelated drivers rooted in social injustice—poverty, harmful social and gender norms, low status of women, and low women's self-efficacy are at play alongside the harsh realities of gender segregation in labor markets, wage gaps and time poverty. To compound these difficulties, as many as 28 per cent of young women are married as children in South Asia and three in four child brides give birth while they are still adolescents, with these girls experiencing compromised agency and increased risks to birth outcomes and for their own nutrition.
In May 2025, we published a set of papers in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia about a stretch of women’s lives that nutrition programmes tend to forget: the weeks and months before pregnancy begins. The papers laid out the evidence, the interventions that work, and a practical algorithm that a health or nutrition provider could use to care for women before, between and beyond pregnancies. A technical brief followed, turning the science into steps a frontline worker could use. But the longer we worked, the more one question stayed with us. The hard part was never about deciding what to deliver but whether the legal and programmatic systems that promise such care would reach the woman they were written for.
From a legal standpoint, there is no comprehensive provision that gives a woman a full package of nutrition care across her life course. At any real scale, very little reaches the underweight woman or the overweight woman with the kind of attention she needs from the public system. And the schemes that do exist tend to falter in exactly the places and circumstances where women need them most. A right you cannot actually reach is not yet a right but a promise still waiting on delivery.
Over twelve monthly pieces through 2026–27, we look at women’s nutrition through a socio-legal and feminist-legal lens, and begin from a simple claim: nutrition is a woman’s right across her entire life, owed to her in her own name and not merely because she carries a child.
That gap is what this series sets out to examine. Over twelve monthly pieces through 2026–27, we look at women’s nutrition through a socio-legal and feminist-legal lens, and begin from a simple claim: nutrition is a woman’s right across her entire life, owed to her in her own name and not merely because she carries a child. Each piece puts the same question to a different law or rule-system. Does it reach women, or pass them by? We weigh constitutional principle, statute, and flagship programmes on women’s health, food, maternity, social protection, data and digital welfare against that test. We trace access through the machinery that really decides it: who qualifies, what papers are demanded, whether the system actually functions the day she walks in, what the frontline worker chooses to do, and whether any judicial remedy catches what the rest of the system drops.
Law on paper, law in action
While laws and programmes differ across South Asia, the ways in which women access their nutrition entitlements and the barriers they encounter offer important points for comparison. For example, in India, the rules meant to guarantee women’s nutrition exist on paper, but only some carry real constitutional weight. The Supreme Court has read the right to food into the right to life under Article 21, including through the long-running litigation in People’s Union for Civil Liberties. Maternity entitlements, cash and in-kind transfers, and support for a safe delivery sit beside it. What decides their fate is everything crammed in between the statute and the woman: the documents she has to produce, the digital identity she has to authenticate, the procedure she has to satisfy, and, increasingly, the algorithm that may quietly rule her out. On their face, the rules treat everyone alike. In practice, they often assume a literacy, a mobility and an ease with institutions that the poorest women simply do not have. The result is that the woman who is poor, migrant, unlettered, caste-marginalised, or shut out of the digital world may be turned away. Upendra Baxi called this gap the distance between law in the books and law in action. This series lives in that gap.
Poor women do not meet nutrition law as a tidy list of entitlements. They meet it at the ration shop, at the anganwadi, in the queue for a maternity benefit, and in a frontline worker’s split-second call about whether their papers are in order. A ration card refused. A benefit that never arrives. A grievance window that opens only for those who already know how to use it. This is where rights are won or lost, and almost none of it shows up in the surveys and dashboards that policy runs on. Our evidence systems count coverage but rarely record refusal. That is not only a failure of service delivery. It is a failure of the rule-system itself, and naming it as such is the first thing this series does.
Women almost never deal with a single law. They move through several overlapping orders at once: statute, administrative guideline, local office practice, community norm, the collective discipline of a self-help group, and sometimes the rough-and-ready justice of a lok adalat. These plural systems decide who eats and who waits far more than any formal entitlement does on its own. They are also where women have built their own fixes when the State’s systems have failed them: through collective bargaining, shared paperwork, and the quiet persistence of women’s networks. If we want to see nutrition justice as it really is, we have to take these living legal practices as seriously as the ones bound in the statute book.
From a legal standpoint, there is no comprehensive provision that gives a woman a full package of nutrition care across her life course.
People are not statistics
Dehumanisation begins with distance. It is easier to deny a person her standing when you have never had to know her as a person, and distance is exactly what a certain kind of policy can manufacture. Our nutrition strategies, for all their polish, name inequity in their goals and then forget to put a human face on the numbers underneath. They file suffering into neat boxes and trust that the right system, properly run, will empty them. But people are not statistics. Reduce a woman to a data point and you risk losing the very thing that makes her a rights-holder. One must ask where is the Adivasi woman, where is the Dalit woman, where is the poorest woman named and heard in the decisions that govern her body, her food, her care and her child’s? Too often, she is not there at all. That silence is the crack running through an otherwise impressive structure, and it is not one we can keep stepping around.
We did not build these systems. We are their witnesses all the same, and the slow normalising of injustice is now ours either to challenge or to inherit. This series brings the women who have been waited out, turned away and quietly overlooked to the front of the conversation, and asks a plain question of those of us who like to think of ourselves as leaders in nutrition, health and law. Will we let these exclusions stand simply because they are lawful on their face? Or will we find the nerve to look hard at how the law actually works for the woman at the end of the road, and keep rebuilding it until it reaches her?
We have written this series for the people who can help close the gap: legal scholars and socio-legal researchers, constitutional and human-rights practitioners, human-rights commissions, the global health and nutrition policy community, and the think tanks and development institutions whose choices quietly write these rules. Read it less as a report on a distant problem and more as a question about whose rights the law is prepared to reach. Because a guarantee that stops short of the most marginalised woman is not yet justice. It is only a rehearsal of it.
Nourishing rule-systems for women is a twelve-part monthly series in The Leaflet, developed under the Asia Collective on Women’s Nutrition (ACTION). It builds on work published in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia (2025) and draws on the sociology of law of Upendra Baxi.