Published May 06, 2026 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated May 06, 2026 | 7:03 AM
Representational image. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Synopsis: A new study on Hyderabad’s egg supply chain reveals systemic failures undermining child nutrition. Smaller, rejected eggs are diverted to Anganwadi centres, cracked eggs circulate in informal markets, and summer heat worsens spoilage without cold storage. With no standards or oversight, vulnerable children face risks of stunting and contamination, highlighting urgent need for regulation and accountability.
For years, the advice has been simple: feed children eggs.
Eggs are cheap, nutritious, carry protein, essential fats, vitamins and minerals in a single affordable package. Governments across India have built nutrition programmes around them. Anganwadi centres distribute them. Public health campaigns promote them.
In Hyderabad, researchers decided to follow that advice all the way to its conclusion. They wanted to see how eggs actually reach children in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, and whether the system delivering them was working.
What they found shook the assumption at the heart of the policy.
The egg supply chain in Hyderabad, they concluded, does not just fail to fix child stunting. In several critical ways, it actively contributes to it.
A new paper published in Food Security (2026) traces how eggs move from commercial farms to children in Hyderabad’s low-income settlements of Addagutta and Warasiguda.
The research team spans two continents and multiple institutions: the Royal Veterinary College in London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of Greenwich, the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, and ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition, which sits in Hyderabad itself.
Researchers interviewed farmers, traders, wholesalers, retailers and egg industry representatives to map every stage of the supply chain. They also spoke with pregnant and lactating mothers from Addagutta and Warasiguda, gathering a ground-level picture of how families in low-income communities actually buy, handle and feed eggs to their children.
The researchers then built a framework to trace how each link in the supply chain connects to child stunting, the condition where children fail to grow to their full height due to chronic malnutrition.
What emerged from that framework was a system shaped not by nutrition science but by market preference, trader power, seasonal heat, cracked shells and the near-total absence of anyone checking whether any of it is safe.
“The widespread absence of standards and regulations and the trust-based system highlight a challenging environment for food safety,” the authors write.
“Stakeholders’ individual perceptions drive business decisions and influence demand, contributing to egg quality variations.”
In plain terms: nobody sets the rules, nobody checks compliance, and the children at the end of the chain absorb the consequences.
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To understand why this matters, start with the numbers.
India recorded a stunting rate of 31.7 percent among children under five in 2022, one of the highest in the world. Globally, over 150 million children under five lived with stunting in 2024.
Stunting is not simply about height. It signals chronic malnutrition that damages physical development, brain function, immune response and long-term health outcomes. Children who experience stunting in their early years carry those consequences into adulthood, affecting their capacity to learn, work and thrive.
In Telangana, Anganwadi centres form the frontline of the government’s response to this crisis. These government-funded childcare centres distribute food, including eggs, to children from the most disadvantaged families. They represent the state’s most direct mechanism for getting nutrition into the bodies of children who need it most.
The assumption driving that mechanism is sound. Eggs work. Research has consistently shown that regular egg consumption among young children produces measurable reductions in stunting rates. Their nutrients are absorbed efficiently by young bodies. They are more effective at preventing stunting than many plant-based alternatives.
But an egg that arrives cracked, contaminated, undersized, or not at all is not a nutrition intervention. It is a missed opportunity, or worse, a health risk.
In Hyderabad, the researchers found all of the above.
In Hyderabad’s egg market, size determines everything.
Consumers prefer larger eggs. Traders pay farmers a premium for them. Larger eggs move faster, command better prices and travel through the most profitable parts of the supply chain.
Smaller eggs, which several stakeholders in the study described as equally or even more nutritious than larger ones, get pushed to the edges of the market. And those edges lead directly to Anganwadi centres.
The logic, from a trader’s perspective, is efficient. The government buys eggs for its nutrition programme. Smaller eggs that consumers do not want still need a buyer. The Anganwadi system becomes a dumping ground for stock the open market has already rejected.
But the researchers found the problem runs deeper than simple redirection.
“A few farmers are cheating. They give small eggs to Anganwadi centres and charge full price. Traders buy small eggs from farmers saying that there is no demand and sell them at higher prices to the government. The fraud that is happening should be stopped as our children are affected,” an egg industry representative told the research team.
The system is not just inefficient. It is being actively manipulated.
Eggs the market rejects get sent to children who have no other choice, and the government pays full market price for them. The families whose children attend Anganwadi centres are Hyderabad’s most economically vulnerable. They have no alternative supply. They have no mechanism to complain. And the traders and farmers exploiting the procurement system face no inspection, no penalty and no accountability.
No oversight mechanism currently exists in Hyderabad to catch or stop this practice.
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Damaged eggs do not disappear from Hyderabad’s supply chain. They find a market.
When eggs crack during transport or storage, the current owner absorbs the loss. Sellers do not replace eggs that crack after delivery. What happens next depends on who holds them.
Farmers consume cracked eggs themselves, pass them to farm workers, sell them to street food stalls or restaurants, or offer them at reduced prices to poorer households in low-income settlements. A secondary, informal market for cracked eggs runs quietly alongside the main supply chain, directing damaged stock toward the communities least equipped to manage the risks that come with it.
A cracked shell is not cosmetic damage. It opens a direct pathway for bacteria to enter the egg. Salmonella, the pathogen most associated with egg contamination, can penetrate through a crack and multiply rapidly, particularly in warm conditions. Indian studies have found Salmonella in raw eggs at rates between 4.8 and 7.7 percent.
The informants who spoke to researchers acknowledged the risk but described a straightforward mitigation: boil the egg immediately and do not keep it more than a day.
“It’s not recommended to keep the cracked eggs for more than one day. There may be some chance of contamination, but we still boil the egg at maximum temperature before eating it so that it doesn’t affect our health,” one farmer told the research team.
The researchers do not dismiss boiling as a strategy. But they warn it addresses only part of the risk.
Before an egg reaches the pot, it sits on surfaces, touches utensils, and comes into contact with other foods. In households with limited access to clean running water, where kitchen surfaces are shared and space is tight, that handling process creates opportunities for cross-contamination that cooking alone cannot undo.
A child who eats a thoroughly boiled egg prepared on a surface contaminated by a cracked raw egg has still been exposed. The authors are direct about the implication: “The consumption and manipulation of cracked eggs could present a health risk for children, either through inadequate cooking or cross-contamination of surfaces and foods.”
The secondary market for cracked eggs, the study concludes, does not just reflect poverty. It channels food safety risk systematically toward the households least equipped to manage it, and toward the young children living inside them.
Hyderabad’s summers are severe. Temperatures cross 40 degrees Celsius and stay there for months. That heat does not just make life uncomfortable. It dismantles the egg supply chain from multiple directions simultaneously.
On the production side, heat stress reduces how many eggs hens lay. Output drops across farms in and around the city.
On the storage side, eggs that do reach the market deteriorate rapidly. Without refrigeration, eggs last one to two weeks during summer compared to one to two months in the cooler months. The window between a safe egg and a spoiled one collapses.
On the demand side, consumers pull back. A deeply held belief across Hyderabad holds that eggs generate body heat during digestion and are unsuitable for summer eating. This perception reduces purchases across the market.
“Due to cool weather, people prefer to eat more eggs in the winter compared to summer season,” one retailer told the research team.
The supply chain offers no protection against any of this. Cold storage does not exist across most of the chain. Farmers, wholesalers and retailers operate on a fast in-and-out model with minimal storage capacity. The eggs move quickly because they have to, not because the system is efficient.
Only supermarkets refrigerate eggs. And Hyderabad’s low-income settlements do not run on supermarket access.
One informant told researchers they deplored the complete absence of government legislation or guidelines on cold storage and transport temperatures. No such rules currently exist in India for domestic egg supply.
The authors are clear about what this means for children: “If not replaced by other nutritious food, a decrease in egg consumption could lead to reduced nutritional intake during these months, potentially impacting stunting.”
For most low-income families in Addagutta and Warasiguda, that replacement does not happen. Eggs disappear from the diet in summer. Nothing takes their place. And children who were already vulnerable to stunting lose their most affordable source of complete nutrition during the months when their bodies work hardest to cope with the heat.
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Running beneath every finding in this study is a single structural failure that makes all the others possible: nobody is watching.
No official quality standards govern how eggs are farmed in Hyderabad. No benchmarks exist for feed quality, hygiene practices, or the use of antibiotics and other inputs on laying farms. Government inspections at farm level are infrequent. Inspections at the retail level happen but are described consistently by informants as superficial.
Written contracts exist in only one part of the chain: between farmers and the government for Anganwadi supply. Everything else runs on verbal agreements, personal relationships and trust built over years of repeated transactions.
In that vacuum, traders hold the power, and they use it.
“Farmers are forced to sell the egg at a lower price as asked or demanded by the traders. Traders take advantage of the farmer’s weakness by asking a lower cost. Because farmers have no way to keep the stock with them,” one official told the research team.
Farmers cannot hold stock. They have no cold storage. They cannot wait for a better price. Traders know this and set terms accordingly. The power imbalance runs through the entire chain and shapes every transaction within it.
Concerns about hormone use on laying hens, antibiotic residues in eggs and aflatoxins in animal feed came up repeatedly during interviews with multiple stakeholders. These concerns were not fringe views. They circulated among retailers, industry representatives and community members.
Farmers and their associations dismissed them as myths created by marketing companies selling alternative products.
The researchers note they found no farm-level inspections to verify either position. The claims exist. The counter-claims exist. And the mechanism to settle the question simply does not.
“Infrastructure gaps, such as inadequate storage and cold chains, affect farmers’ bargaining power and egg quality, especially in summer,” the authors write.
The national poultry action plan, the study notes, focuses on scaling up production and improving export standards. It says almost nothing about domestic food safety or the nutritional quality of eggs reaching children inside India.
The trust-based system that fills this regulatory gap, the researchers conclude, does not just create uncertainty. It actively conceals what sits inside it. And Hyderabad’s children, particularly those in low-income settlements with no alternative sources of nutrition, absorb what that concealment hides.
The study does not conclude that eggs should be removed from nutrition programmes or that families should stop feeding them to children. The nutritional case for eggs remains strong.
What the researchers argue is that the chain carrying eggs to Hyderabad’s children needs to be rebuilt around the children it is supposed to serve.
They call for cold chain infrastructure across egg transport and storage in Hyderabad, a gap that traders, farmers and retailers all acknowledge but that no government policy currently addresses.
They call for stricter oversight of the Anganwadi procurement system, with inspections capable of catching the pricing manipulation and quality diversion the study documents.
They call for farm-level inspections that currently exist in no meaningful form, and for official quality standards that govern not just eggs destined for export but eggs destined for the children of Telangana.
And they call for a direct connection between agricultural decisions and child health outcomes, so that the people who grow, trade and distribute eggs in Hyderabad understand and are held accountable for the nutritional consequences of how they do it.
“These findings offer a basis for dialogue with public and private stakeholders to develop targeted interventions that can support efforts to combat stunting in Hyderabad,” the authors write.
The researchers also underscore that this is not a problem unique to eggs. It reflects how food systems in low-income urban India operate more broadly, and how the gap between a nutrition policy and a child’s plate can swallow the best intentions whole.
India recorded a stunting rate of 31.7 percent among children under five in 2022. One in three children in this country does not grow to their full potential. In Hyderabad’s low-income settlements, that number sits against a backdrop of daily decisions made by mothers, traders, farmers and government officials, each one shaping what a child eats and what that food does to their body.
Eggs were supposed to be the answer. Affordable. Nutritious. Scalable. A practical solution to a vast and stubborn problem.
They still can be. But only if the egg that arrives at a child in Addagutta or Warasiguda is safe, fresh, fairly procured and part of a system that someone, somewhere, is actually responsible for.
Right now, the researchers found, it is cracked. It is small. It sat in the heat without refrigeration. It passed through hands that answered to no inspector and signed no contract. And it reached the child because the market did not want it.
