Child Malnutrition in India

Vani Borooah

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This chapter examines child malnutrition in India. Even though the incidence of malnutrition in India has declined greatly since Independence, the prevalence of malnutrition in India remains extremely high, even relative to other poor countries. It is, however, difficult to arrive at a universally acceptable explanation for why this should be so. The contribution of this chapter is to examine the relative strengths of the determinants of child malnutrition in India, paying attention to household characteristics (social group, consumption level, education, location) and the characteristics of the households’ dwellings (presence of toilets, separate kitchen, vent in the cooking area). The analysis also examines the importance of anganwadis in combating child malnutrition through growth monitoring, health checks, and the provision of supplementary food. In addition, a unique characteristic of this chapter is that it draws attention to the importance of personal hygiene, through washing hands with soap and water after defecation, as a prophylactic against diarrhoeal disease.

Keywords: Children; malnutrition; India; social groups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I15 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Health and Well-Being in India Palgrave Macmillan (2018): pp. 105-142

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/90550/1/MPRA_paper_90550.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:90550

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().