Description
Introduction – Objectives: Childhood food poverty, defined as children's limited access to a diverse diet in early life, remains a critical issue in India. In light of the limited research on understanding the determinants of severe food poverty and dietary diversity failure among children, this paper examines the socio-demographic and regional disparities in food poverty, including severe dietary diversity and also its impact on child undernutrition. Achieving minimum dietary diversity entails providing the child with food from at least five distinct food groups. These food items were grouped into eight categories to derive the Minimum Dietary Diversity. A child was considered to be living in food poverty or having a minimum dietary diversity failure if they had consumed food items from four or fewer food groups out of the eight. Using the latest 2019-2021 National Family Health Survey data, this paper provides new insights on regional disparities in food poverty, socio-demographic factors and child malnutrition.
Methodology: In examining food poverty, this paper focuses on a number of key child and maternal characteristics and other macro/group/household-level attributes. These included region of residence, place of residence (rural vs urban), age of child and mother, birth order, caste, religion, wealth index, mother’s educational attainment, and sex composition of siblings. Bivariate and multivariate analyses (logistic regression) were employed to understand the food poverty (minimum dietary diversity failure) among children. The adjusted odds ratio was calculated to assess the association between food poverty or dietary diversity failure and child, maternal, socio-economic, and demographic factors.
Results and Discussions: The paper has shown distinct geographical variations and socio-demographic associations in dietary diversity and food poverty among 6-23 months old children. Among children aged 6-11 months, those from the central region of India had a 46% higher likelihood of living in severe food poverty than children from the northern region. The results indicate that region, place of residence (rural vs urban), household wealth, mother’s age and mother’s education emerged as key factors of importance for severe food poverty. In households with an equal number of sons and daughters, daughters experienced a slightly higher prevalence of dietary diversity failure (76%) compared to sons in similar households (74%).
Conclusions: The findings reinforce the demand for targeted interventions and underscore the urgency of addressing childhood food poverty for the betterment of Indian society. This research contributes to the discourse on food security and informs the importance of regional differences when promoting Infant and Young Child Feeding practices, laying the foundation for context-specific planning in India.
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