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Cultural, Ecological and Contextual Drivers of Triple Burden of Malnutrition among Children in India: Macro and Micro Perspectives

Shri Kant Singh, International Institue for Population Science (IIPS)
Sarang Pedgaonkar, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Alka Chauhan, International Institute for Population Sciences

This paper aims to analyze the embodiment of the triple burden of malnutrition among under-five children encompassing stunting and underweight, overweight, and anemia. It focuses on various cultural and contextual drivers of malnutrition and juxtaposing them against macro-level and micro-level perspectives using the last two rounds of Indian DHS. The results depict—at the macro level—most districts have anemia prevalence above 40 percent; western and eastern districts have slid into a triple burden of malnutrition with a high prevalence of underweight, overweight, and anemia. Between 2015 and 2020, Bihar has shown a significant decline in stunting (48% to 43%) and underweight (44% to 41%), yet being the highest. The burden of childhood malnutrition remarkably varies across various cultural and contextual domains. The children belonging to mothers with higher secondary or above education, mothers with normal BMI, households with access to toilet facility showed a lower prevalence of multiple malnutrition indicators. The coexistence of stunting, underweight, overweight, and anemia at the macro-level circumstantiate the triple burden of childhood malnutrition with tremendous spatial variation. A wide range of predictors heavily influences the nutritional status of children and hence demands multilevel interventions to address this heterogeneous set of coexisting drivers.

Keywords: Health and morbidity, Spatial analysis/regression, Spatial dependence/heterogeneity, Policy

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P18.