Workers at the centre will try to teach Sheela how best to care for her son, paying her 35 rupees (nearly $1) a day and providing meals to compensate for her lost labourer's income.
Several times a day, Deepak sips a sweet mixture of ground puffed rice and sugar dissolved in milk with a little vegetable oil. Older children move on to fruit, eggs and lentils.
For Kasumal Adivasi, sitting a few beds away, the centre was a revelation. Like Sheela, she felt there was no one in her husband's village she could turn to for advice.
After 12 days at the centre, Tunda, her 2-year-old son, still has a distended stomach and a slightly grumpy disposition, but at least he is able to stand up again with his mother's help.
"I promise, promise, promise to remember what you told me," she told a nurse, before reciting some of the dietary tips she has learnt at the centre. She smiled with gratitude and relief, her hand resting on her pregnant belly.
STILL GAPS
The Madhya Pradesh government adopted the nutrition centres after liking what it saw at a pilot centre set up in the state by UNICEF. There are now more than 60 in Madhya Pradesh, and they are spreading to other states as part of the NRHM.
But UNICEF staff warn that the limited beds at the nutrition clinics are far from an end in themselves. They are a last resort, taking in only the most dangerously undernourished children. Two weeks later, they are discharged, most still malnourished, but no longer quite so at risk of dying.
"There are still big gaps in the guidelines," said Hamid El-Bashir, the UNICEF representative for Madhya Pradesh.
Under the rural health mission, health workers are being asked to help check malnutrition before it reaches such a bleak stage, but in places like Madhya Pradesh where healthy children are in a minority, locals can become inured to the signs.
"His hair just hasn't been washed," said one young village worker when her attention was brought to a young child with yellowing frizz on his scalp and scaly skin.
Some, like Biraj Patnaik, an advisor to the Supreme Court on nutrition, think good advice only goes so far, and India's top priority is fixing its graft-tainted food distribution system.
"Across the country women are rationing their own food, feeding their babies at their own personal cost," he said. "There's absolute hunger out there."
UNICEF's El-Bashir thinks fortified biscuits or similar so-called ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF) used in some famine-hit African countries could be part of the solution.
Convincing India's government could be tricky though as it likes to promote traditional Indian food staples grown and cooked locally, saying it is cheap, creates jobs and is less prone to graft.
"RUTF has been a real revolution," El-Bashir said. "India cannot just say no."
