Confronting a Silent Epidemic: Child Nutrition Dynamics in India through Women’s Empowerment

Bharti Singh, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Shri Kant Singh, International Institue for Population Science (IIPS)

This study aims to construct a composite index of women's empowerment, encompassing six critical dimensions, to examine its influence on child nutritional outcomes in India. The study used the recent three rounds of the National Family Health Survey. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) test of sampling adequacy has been used before constructing a composite index of women's empowerment using Confirmatory Factor Analysis. This study includes Kernel Density plots to understand the distribution of stunting, wasting, and underweight, along with Linear Polynomial graphs to facilitate an understanding of how these parameters evolve with the child's age. Further, Binary Logistic regression and Multilevel analysis were conducted to identify associations and vulnerable levels (State-level, PSU-level, and household-level) that impact undernutrition. Our study reveals that NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 exhibit an equal density of severely stunted cases. NFHS-5 indicates a limited decline in wasting among children aged five, while the density of severely wasted children remains consistent across NFHS-3, 4, and 5. Women with higher empowerment had a lower risk of their children being undernourished (NFHS-4= -0.12**[-0.21, -0.03]; NFHS-5= -0.15***[-0.24, -0.06]). Multilevel analysis suggests household-level vulnerability as the value of Intra Class Correlation remains the highest compared to the other levels in all the survey years.

Keywords: Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Health and Morbidity, Multi-level modeling , Data visualisation

See extended abstract.