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Risk factors of child undernutrition in India

whose mother’s BMI is normal. Later it was observed that there was an inverse relationship between children’s age
and wasting, thus the odds ratio for wasting decreased with an increase in the child age. Among the children in the age
group of 25-59 months were twice likely to be wasted than those of the age group between 0 and 6 months. Wasting has
an inverse relationship with the mother’s educational status and household wealth index. Children of mothers whose
educational level is <5 years were 1.2 times more likely to have wasted than children of mothers whose level of education
is 12 years or more. The odds of having acute malnutrition were 1.3 times more among the children belonging to the
poorest family as compared to their reference. In comparison to the child belonging to other castes, SC, ST, and OBC
were prone to be wasted. Babies born with smaller size were 1.3 times more possible to be wasted than that of babies born
with the larger size

3.3. CI
The CI for stunting was −0.14 (standard error SE = 0.04), and a negative value indicates that the higher probability of
being stunted is seen in poor children than their better-off peers. Similarly, the CI for underweight and wasting was
observed as −0.16 (SE = 0.04) and −0.08 (SE = 0.02). These negative values imply that poor children had a higher
probability than their better-off peers in underweight and wasting.
Similarly, the concentration curve for stunting, underweight, and wasting in India for the year of 2015-2016,
respectively is, represented in Figure 1. The plot shows that the concentration curve for all three nutritional indices lie
above the line of equality, which suggests that the burden of malnutrition was higher among the under-five aged children
who have poorer wealth index. The negative sign of the CI (Table 3) also confirms this graphical exploration of inequality
in child undernutrition.

4. Discussion
This study identified that the risk factors associated with child malnutrition are in terms of stunting, underweight, and
wasting among 0-59 month’s age children in India using the NFHS-4 data. Our study revealed that the factors (Child’s age

Figure 1. Concentration curves for the child malnutrition (Stunting, underweight, and wasting), India 2015-2016.

20 International Journal of Population Studies | 2019, Volume 5, Issue 2