Data & method

Child growth references

0 to 5 years: WHO Child Growth Standards. Percentile values are reproduced from the published WHO tables without modification.

Source: WHO Child Growth Standards (2006). Length/height-for-age and weight-for-age percentile tables (birth to 5 years), WHO Multicentre Growth Reference Study Group. Values are WHO's own published percentile values (LMS-derived), transcribed verbatim from the official WHO Excel percentile tables. Tables.

5 to 18 years: Indian Academy of Pediatrics 2015 revised growth charts, built from measurements of contemporary Indian children and recommended by the IAP for this age range in preference to the WHO reference.

Source: Khadilkar V, Yadav S, Agrawal KK, Tamboli S, Banerjee M, Cherian A, Goyal JP, Khadilkar A, Kumaravel V, Mohan V, Narayanappa D, Ray I, Yewale V; IAP Growth Chart Committee. Revised IAP Growth Charts for Height, Weight and Body Mass Index for 5- to 18-year-old Indian Children. Indian Pediatrics 2015;52(1):47-55. Tables II (boys height), III (boys weight), IV (girls height), V (girls weight). Paper.

Length versus height. The WHO tables measure children lying down (recumbent length) to 24 months and standing (height) from 25 months. They are different measurements — the same child measures about 0.7 cm shorter standing — and WHO's published tables contain that discontinuity at the boundary. This site reproduces it rather than smoothing it out, and every under-five page states which measurement it is showing. Anyone who plots the two together as one continuous curve has introduced an artefact.

The IAP tables are published in half-year steps from 5.0 to 18.0 years. Every published row appears in the tables on this site; only whole years get their own page.

Where a source publishes a percentile this site does not show, it is because the published table did not carry it for that age — never because it was dropped for convenience. Where a cell shows a dash, the source does not publish that value. No percentile on this site is interpolated between published ages or between published percentiles. That is the single most important rule in this codebase, because interpolating a growth curve produces numbers that look authoritative and are not in any published reference.

Adult height and weight ranges

healthy weight = BMI × height (m)²

The height-weight chart applies two published BMI bands — the Asian-Indian action points of 18.5–22.9 identified by the WHO expert consultation for Asian populations, and the WHO international healthy band of 18.5–24.9 — to each height. No age adjustment is applied, because no published adult classification has an age term. Charts that vary the healthy weight by decade are reproducing mid-twentieth-century insurance tables, not a current classification.

The BMI argument itself — why 23 rather than 25, and where the two scales disagree — belongs to the sister site SehatCheck and is not restated here.

Source: WHO Expert Consultation. “Appropriate body-mass index for Asian populations and its implications for policy and intervention strategies.” The Lancet 2004;363(9403):157–163.
Source: World Health Organization. Body mass index — BMI, international classification of adult underweight, overweight and obesity.

Population height figures

National and country mean heights come from the source named on each page; the Indian national figure on this site is attributed to NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), 'A century of trends in adult human height', eLife 2016;5:e13410 - country mean height at age 18 by year of birth. Country comparisons use the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration pooled analysis of measured heights — self-reported height surveys run systematically tall and are not used here.

Source: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). “A century of trends in adult human height.” eLife 2016;5:e13410, with country mean heights updated at ncdrisc.org. Data downloads.

State and union territory figures

State pages carry the indicators the National Family Health Survey actually publishes at state level, with the round cited on the page. An important clarification that most sites get wrong: NFHS does not publish a headline mean adult height. It publishes measured-height-derived indicators — most prominently the share of women aged 15–49 below 145 cm — which is a threshold count used as a nutritional and obstetric-risk marker, not an average.

Where a state's figure could not be verified against the source, that state was omitted from this site entirely rather than filled in from a secondary aggregator or interpolated from its neighbours. 36 states and union territories are published.

Rounding and units

Heights and weights to one decimal place, matching the published tables. Feet-and-inches conversions are rounded to the nearest inch and are always shown alongside the centimetre figure, never instead of it. Percentages as published.

What this site deliberately does not publish

• Any growth percentile for an age the reference does not tabulate.
• Any state figure that could not be traced to the survey source.
• Any BMI-for-age assessment of an individual child, or any language that would let a table read as a diagnosis.
• Any claim that adult height can be increased.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with the primary source, the primary source wins and the page gets fixed. Send the URL.