Understanding Malnutrition of Tribal Children in India: The Role of Women’s Empowerment

ABSTRACT

Child malnutrition is considered to be the key risk factor for illness during adolescence and is responsible for about one-third of child deaths globally. Historically tribal communities have lagged behind the general population in terms of most socioeconomic aspects, and one such aspect is the nutritional status of children. The present study analyzes regional variations in child malnutrition and its association with women’s empowerment in the tribal communities of India. The investigation is based on secondary data compiled from India’s third National Family Health Survey (NFHS). Both bivariate and multivariate techniques were used to analyze data. We found a conditional inverse association between child malnutrition and women’s empowerment in tribal communities. It is conditional in the sense that women’s empowerment is effective when other factors supposed to influence nutritional status are proactive. Policy prescriptions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• child malnutrition
• India
• logistic regression
• scheduled tribe
• women’s empowerment

Notes

¹ Full vaccination includes Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, three injections of diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus (DPT) vaccine, three doses of polio (excluding Polio 0) vaccine, and measles vaccine.

² World Health Organization (WHO 2009) growth standards have been used to estimate the incidence of malnutrition. See NFHS-3 for details of weight-for-height Z score methodology.

³ We could not consider the political dimension of women’s empowerment due to nonavailability of data at the source.

⁴ The URL of the data set is http://www.rchiips.org/nfhs/factsheet.shtml

⁵ See appendix B to find the list of states considered in the present study.

⁶ Schedule Tribes (STs) comprise 8.2% of India’s population, and they mostly reside in forests and hilly terrains isolated from the other elite communities (Census 2011).

⁷ See chapter 1, pages 11–16, of NHHS-3 national report.

⁸ Analysis of variance (ANOVA) test shows that the null hypothesis of no variation has been rejected beyond the 5% level of significance with F value equal to 3.83.

⁹ Scheduled Class (SC) is the official name given in India to the lowest caste, considered “untouchable” in orthodox Hindu scriptures and practice, officially regarded as socially disadvantaged. Other Backward Class (OBC) is a collective term used by the Government of India to classify castes that are socially and educationally disadvantaged other than SC and ST (Planning Commission 1951; Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment 2009).

¹⁰ IBM SPSS version 20 has been used to carry out this investigation.

¹¹ Since all the variables are expressed in percentage form, we have not standardized the variables.

¹² ANOVA test confirms this. The null hypothesis of “no variation” has been rejected beyond the 1% level of significance with F value equal to 5.53.

¹³ The correlation coefficients of full vaccination (FV) with wealth index and birth order have been found to be 0.445 and −0.706, respectively, and are statistically significant. In this context, regarding the inclusion of full vaccination as an explanatory variable, although it has been insignificant in the model, it is not redundant. Hence, we have included FV in our final model.

¹⁴ We have investigated the possible interaction effects of all the variables several times. The investigation shows that, barring “WEI*MC,” all interactions are statistically redundant. Thus, we have not considered them in the final model.