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Forced migration and cognitive well-being in childhood in India

was about 42 million in 2008, and about 44% of these migrants were children below age 18 (UNHCR, 2009). Findings
of the present study call for immediate interventions from government and non-government organizations. Given the
evidence about the effect of early childhood cognitive development on education, productivity, and job performance,
children from migrant households need special interventions that attenuate the long-term effect of early childhood
cognitive development on human capital. Interventions should pay attention to the most vulnerable children who were
displaced during critical development ages. Social programmes executed in other developing countries have shown a
positive effect of the intervention programmes on education and health of displaced children (Bernal et al., 2009). Further
studies are needed to compare cognitive development among children born in a household during migration and those
born after migration in the same household. Moreover, a follow-up of these children is necessary to assess the relationship
between cognitive development and income during adulthood.

5. Conclusions
A number of studies have examined the adverse effect of forced migration on child nutritional status, childhood
immunization and school dropout rates in developing countries. However, research on the effect of forced migration on
child cognitive well-being is still lacking in developing countries including India. Therefore, using longitudinal data from
three waves of the Young Lives Study conducted during 2002, 2006–2007 and 2009, the present study examined the effect
of forced migration during early childhood on cognitive well-being at later age. We found that forced migration during
early childhood was significantly associated with poor cognitive well-being at later childhood. The study also found that
the adverse effect of forced migration on child cognition was not mitigated by maternal social support. The findings of
this study have implications for intervention programmes that should pay attention to the most vulnerable children who
were displaced during critical development ages.
Authors’ Contributions

AKU conceived the idea, designed the experiment and analysed the data; AKU, SS and CP drafted the manuscript. All
authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethical Approval
Our study is based on a secondary dataset with no identifiable information on the survey participants. This dataset is
available in the public domain for research use; hence no approval was required from any institutional review board. The
data can be downloaded from the website of the United Kingdom Data Archives University of Essex after creating an
account (https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/). The data for the current study was downloaded from the afore-mentioned
website after taking permission (I.D. No. 90978).
Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Availability of Data and Materials
The data which support our findings is contained within the manuscript.

Funding
No funding was available for this study.

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26 International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2