NFHS State Explorer
India's health and nutrition indicators by state, with rural and urban shown separately rather than rolled into one figure. Most published NFHS state tables give you the combined number; on a wide gap that number describes neither half of the state. 136 indicators across NFHS-4 (2015-16) and NFHS-5 (2019-21), from the government's own data service.
Why rural and urban separately
A state's combined figure is a population-weighted average of two populations that often differ sharply. Kerala's children under five who are stunted went from 19.7% to 23.4% between the rounds — but that is 19.5% to 26.4% in rural Kerala against 19.8% to 20.1% in urban. Nearly all of the change is rural, and the combined number shows about half of it. Which figure you quote decides where a programme goes.
▸ How to read this explorer
- Start with the question. Tap any underlined word to change the indicator, the state or the view.
- Four views. Rank states by the size of the rural–urban gap; Track what changed between the rounds for each half separately; read one state's whole profile; or List the full table and download it.
- Every figure is as published. A dagger (†) marks an estimate based on 25–49 unweighted cases, which NFHS prints in brackets to warn you it is unreliable. An em dash means the figure was not published, or was suppressed for fewer than 25 cases. Nothing here is interpolated.
- No indicator is coloured good or bad. Rural and urban keep the same two colours throughout. Whether a rise is progress depends on the indicator, and that judgement is yours.
Making sense of the numbers
What NFHS is. The National Family Health Survey is India's largest household survey on health, nutrition and family welfare. NFHS-4 was fielded in 2015-16 and NFHS-5 in 2019-21. Both are designed to produce estimates for states and union territories, and separately for their rural and urban populations, which is the split this page uses.
Five units cannot be compared across the rounds. Jammu & Kashmir was reorganised in October 2019: NFHS-4 covered the undivided state including Ladakh, NFHS-5 does not, so its change figure would compare two different places. Ladakh appears in NFHS-5 only. Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu were separate union territories in NFHS-4 and one merged territory in NFHS-5. The change view leaves all five out rather than showing a number that looks real; the other views keep them, each with a note.
What the markers mean. Of the 27,084 published figures, 25,761 are plain estimates, 375 are printed by NFHS in brackets because they rest on 25–49 unweighted cases (kept here and marked †), 414 are suppressed because fewer than 25 cases were available, and 534 were not published for that state, sector or round. Suppressed and unpublished figures both show as an em dash. None of them is filled in by estimation.
Indicator names. Twenty-one of the 136 names as published carry plain typing errors — wih for with, swith for with, a stray brace closing a bracket, a footnote number left inside the text. Those are corrected here so the list is searchable; no figure was touched, and nothing else about the wording was changed.
Comparing the two rounds. Some indicators were added or reworded for NFHS-5 and so have no NFHS-4 value. Where either round is missing, no change is shown. The change view reports differences in percentage points, not percentage change, because most of these indicators are already percentages.
Figures come from the MoSPI eSankhyiki NFHS data service (Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, Government of India), endpoint api.mospi.gov.in/api/nfhs/getNfhsRecords, retrieved 27 August 2026, across all 21 indicator groups it publishes. For methodology and authoritative interpretation, consult the International Institute for Population Sciences, which conducts the survey. This is an independent, source-linked interface for learning and discussion. ImpactMojo is not affiliated with MoSPI or IIPS.