This study was undertaken to understand the relationship between poor sanitation and hygiene, clean drinking water, toilet use, mother’s education, and religious practices and stunting. A human rights theoretical framework was utilized for this study. The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal linkages between childhood stunting and determinants such as religion and mother’s education. The study used data from the Third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3; International Institute for Population Sciences, 2006). The sample consisted of 17,239 women between the ages of 15 and 49 with a child between the ages of 2 and 5. The dependent variable, stunting, is dichotomized to create stunted and non-stunted groups. Logistic regression and factorial ANOVA were used to test how access to clean drinking water, toilet use, mother’s education, and religious practices impact childhood stunting. International social work efforts should focus on working with social institutions that improve women’s status, and enlisting their participation in public sanitation campaigns will potentially save India from losing its most valuable resource—children. This study pioneers an empirical approach toward developing interventions based on a human rights approach. The approach illustrated in this study may be replicated for developing social work interventions for any number of social problems, which may be cast as a human rights issue.