outcomes between the children in the treatment group and their matched counterparts in the control group.<sup>26</sup> The results, indicate little overall effect of the ICDS program on nutritional outcomes (Table 4). We find that the only significant effect of the program was a positive effect on boys’ stunting in the data from the 1992 survey, but not in 1998. For girls, the effect was not significant. We disaggregated the results to see whether there are significant effects at regional levels, but found none except a significant _negative_ impact in the poor Northern states, and in the Northeastern states. There, children living in an ICDS village had a higher probability of being underweight in the 1998 survey.

Other studies also find little evidence of program impact on child nutritional status. A national study (NIPCCD 1992) found the prevalence of underweight children to be somewhat lower where the program was in place, but given the sample sizes of the control and treatment groups these differences are not statistically significant. Using the 1992 NFHS data, Deolalikar (2004) found that the presence of an ICDS center is associated with a 5 percent reduction in the probability of being underweight for boys, but not for girls. Our results from the same survey are in line with this (Table 4). Using data from a sub-group of states, Bredenkamp (2004) found that the presence of a center has no significant effect.

Our results on program impact are not conclusive, because of the absence of panel data on children (or villages) participating in the program. Our method is an improvement on previous studies, because we tried to control for various observed factors that could bias the estimates of the effects of the ICDS programs. However, with cross-sectional data some unobservable household or village characteristics correlated with the program placement and program outcome could introduce bias into the estimates of project impact.<sup>27</sup> If, for example, the program were placed in a village because a food shortage was anticipated there, the evaluation procedure would underestimate the effectiveness in the program. Given the available data, we can only say that there is nothing to indicate that the program has had an impact.

> 26 To measure the difference in nutritional outcomes between the children from the villages with and without the program, we use the standard estimator of the average treatment on the treated defined as: _E(z1 –z0| s=1),_ where _z1_ is a particular health outcome (z-scores) for the child in the treatment and z0 is a z-score for a child in the control group, and _s_ is the binary indicator equals to 1 if the child resides in the village with the program and 0 otherwise. We can also define the average effect conditional on some set of child’s characteristics **x** as: _E(z1 – z0| s=1,_ **x** _)._ Matching estimators require that conditional on a vector of observed characteristics, **x,** ( _z1_ and _z0_ ) are independent of _s_ .

Children for whom a match could not be found were dropped from the analysis in order to avoid the primary cause of a bias in a matching estimator (Heckman, Ichimura and Todd 1997, 1998).

27 This problem is thought to be severe for the programs in poor areas if the deficient state of children’s health in the initial period not only attracts the program, but also reduces future growth (Jalan and Ravallion 2003).

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