Women’s Malnutrition in India: The Role of Economic and Social Status

This study has used India Human Development Survey, 2005 to study the factors influencing the Body Mass Index (BMI) of women between 20 to 40 years of age in India. BMI captures both undernutrition and over nutrition and a quantile regression model has been used to capture the differential impact of the explanatory variables across the wide range of its values. Variables like per capita income, per capita consumption expenditure and wealth are all important in explaining the variations in BMI but the impact varies across the quantiles. Impact of per capita consumption expenditure is higher than that of the per capita income indicating the effectiveness with which the resources are converted to consumption. Higher levels of wealth status impact BMI more across all the quantiles. Women’s autonomy index shows a positive impact only for higher levels of the index value but the magnitude is very small. In comparison to this, poor dietary diversity, women with younger children, and those working in agriculture related economic activities are worse off with significantly higher impact. Similarly access to clean and safe drinking water, good sanitation facility and use of clean cooking fuel like LPG have a favourable impact on women’s BMI.