India comprises one-sixth of the world’s population and one-third of the global burden of undernutrition. Between 2006 and 2016, India made progress in reducing stunting among children below five years; the progress, however, was not uniform across all its states (Menon et al. 2018). There are interstate differences in stunting reduction despite a common national policy framework for nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programs. Given the paucity of insights on what factors drive successful change in nutritional outcomes such as stunting at the state level in India, we conducted studies in the four states of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha, and Tamil Nadu.