We are happy to announce the publication of our paper “Predicting Transitions in Stunting, Wasting and Underweight Among Children in Aspirational Districts of India” by Sage in Indian Journal of Human Development.
https://doi.org/10.1177/09737030251329620
It was a complex but interesting exercise, wherein first the data regarding Stunting, Wasting and Underweight for children under 5 years of age was extracted from NFHS 5, for all the 112 Aspiration Districts. (ADs) Thereafter, the same data for children belonging to the 2 poorest quintiles of the population was extracted from the NFHS data. Lastly, data for children under 3 years was extracted to make it comparable with the data that emerged from the Karnataka Multisectoral Nutrition Pilot Projects and the findings of the paper, “Multisectoral Nutrition Interventions and Their Impact on the Nutritional Status of Children: An Open Experiment in Two Remote Blocks of Karnataka, India” which provided clear evidence of constant transitions within stunting, wasting and underweight as interventions progressed and rapid improvement in the nutritional status of children.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09737030221098979?journalCode=jhda
We then used the findings and outcome data of this Paper and applied it to the Aspiration Districts data using linear, exponential and logarithmic regression to predict the improvement of these three child growth measures, after implementation of the KMNPP interventions for a period of five years with the same coverage and rigour. In five years, as per the linear regression trend, stunting will decreas from 46.3% to 30.4%, wasting from 24.6% to 9.0% and underweight from 43.0% to 1.2% in the two lowest quintile households of 112 Aspiration Districts. Due to these improvements in the two lowest quintile households of Aspirational Districts, stunting percentage will reduce from 41.7% to 33.6%, wasting from 22.8% to 15.5% and underweight from 38.0% to 20.7% in all the 112 of Aspirational Districts. And nationally, stunting will reduce from 36.2% to 31.4%, wasting from 19.9% to 16.1%, underweight from 31.2% to 23.5%. This will be in addition to the improvement which will happen on account of ongoing programmes and general improvement in the standard of living.
The indicators for stunting, wasting, and underweight for children in the ADs, especially the 2 poorest quintiles are considerably worse than those of non-ADs. I think it is time to make a strong case to policy makers for introducing additional interventions in on-going national programmes for the more backward and less developed areas of our country. This is important for faster human development and strengthening our demographic dividend, on whom we greatly depend for our future economic development