Association between Precipitation Variability and Child Health in India

Mohammed Salih, IIT Mandi
Mayanka Ambade, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Shyamasree Dasgupta, IIT Mandi, Himachal Pradesh
Anamika Barua, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Indu K Murthy , CSTEP, Bengaluru

Child health, especially those under five years of age is largely contingent upon adequate nutrition, which in turn depends on agricultural productivity that depends highly on precipitation. This study undertook an empirical analysis of the impact of precipitation variability on child health outcomes such as diarrhea, wasting (weight-for-height-z-score), and underweight (weight-for-age-z-score). As a measure of climate anomaly, Standardized Precipitation Index which takes both negative and positive values and is considered to be normal between -1 and 1, indicating wetness if it is positive and dryness if it is negative. We used monthly SPI data between 2015 and 2019 for each district of India and used it to create seasonal averages of the years 2015,2016, and 2019 for every geographic unit. Further, SPI values were used to assess the association between climate variability (anomaly) with child health at ecological as well as individual levels. The study has found that during summer and winter, with an increase in dryness the chance of getting affected by diarrhea, wasting, and underweight also increases, and during monsoon and post-monsoon the chance for diarrhea, underweight, and wasting reduces with dryness among under 5 aged children.

Keywords: Health and Morbidity, Population, Shocks and Pandemics, Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Computational social science methods

See paper.