The Caste-Wealth Nexus and Child Nutrition: A Study of Empowered Action Group of States in India

Children are the most precious and sensitive nutrition sub-group of a nation. It is accepted that there is high death rate in children because of severe forms of malnutrition. The Scheduled Tribes (STs) or Adivasi and Scheduled Castes (SCs) were always economically and socially deprived group of the Indian society. The Empowered Action Group (EAG) states are the most vulnerable states in India. Moreover, no one study focuses on this socially deprived a group of society in the EAG-states. This paper seeks to examine the inequality in child nutrition among SCs/STs and non-SCs/STs of poor and non-poor households and its determinant in EAG-states of India using the third round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3). The analysis has used the cross-sectional data of NFHS-3 conducted during 2005-06 by using bi-variate and multivariate technique. Bi-variate has been used for obtaining the prevalence of stunting, wasting, and underweight in SCs/STs and non-SCs/STs between poor and non-poor children. Elsewhere, multivariate analysis has been used to find out the associated factors of child malnutrition. Findings from the analysis show that nearly two out of three under-five children were stunted and underweight whereas one out of three were wasted in poor households. Every second SCs/STs children were stunted (51 %) in non-poor households. However, less than half of non-SCs/STs children were stunted (43 %) and underweight (36 %) in non-poor households. Mothers education, duration of breastfeeding, birth order and interaction between caste and wealth index were the significant (pless than0.05) contributing factors for stunting, wasting and underweight. The SCs/STs of poor and non-poor households and non-SCs/STs of poor families children were more malnourished than non-SCs/STs of non-poor households. Findings suggest that for reducing the economic inequalities and caste effect there should be separate policy and making services more accessible to SCs/STs and poor non-SCs/STs to improve childhood nutrition in EAG-states.