Biological, Programmatic and Sociopolitical Dimensions of Child Undernutrition in Three States in India

The recently developed India State Hunger Index 2008 highlights the continuing sorry state of hunger in India, and shows that children underweight makes the largest contribution to hunger index scores for most of India. In this article, we apply an assessment framework developed by the Mainstreaming Nutrition Initiative to understand three dimensions of child undernutrition in India: (1) the biological/epidemiological aspects of the nutrition situation, (2) the programmatic interventions and environment and (3) the sociopolitical environment for nutrition. We conduct this assessment for three states in India, each of which offers a distinct typology: (a) Bihar, an extremely poor northern state with high levels of undernutrition; (b) Karnataka, a southern state with high economic growth, but high child undernutrition rates; (c) Tamil Nadu, a southern state portrayed as an example of successful health and nutrition programming, but with rates of undernutrition that are still very high

Household headship and academic skills of Indian children: a special focus on gender disparities

Using multivariate analyses and reading, mathematics and writing scores of children (aged 8-11 years) from a nationally representative sample, we find that children from female headed households either perform better or similar, but never worse than those from male headed households. Also, household fixed effect analysis reveals no gender disparity in academic scores of children belonging to female headed households, a case not true for children from male headed households. We relate this finding to gender parity in educational expenditure on children in female headed households against gender disparity in the same in households headed by males. Based on our findings we also offer some policy suggestion