The Role of Women's Empowerment on Child Nutrition in India

Abstract

Child malnutrition remains a pervasive problem in India though there are significant improvements in several health indicators with country’s consistent economic growth. Along with other factors, maternal autonomy is considered to be critical in influencing health outcome of a child. This paper attempts to examine the determinants of nutritional measures of children under age five with the focus on the role of mother’s autonomy in India. There are many literature which link characteristics of mother, like education, age, with nutrition of her children. But maternal autonomy is a complex subject as this variable is not tangible. Women’s autonomy in daily life is more likely to result in their better healthcare which in turn influences children’s birth weight and infant nutrition. We used nationally representative India Human Development Survey 2004-05 (IHDS- 1) and 2011-12 (IHDS 2) data for the analysis. Logistic regressions are used to study the effect after controlling for child-specific variables (age, sex), mother-specific variables (age, height, education, age at marriage,), demographic information (caste, religion), household characteristics (wealth, region). We have used the panel data with two waves and used mothers fixed effect model to evaluate the impact of maternal autonomy. A child’s height-for-age (stunting) is an indicator of chronic malnutrition. Our sample is restricted to children below five years. Final sample contains 9,389 children below five for which height and weight both are available to calculate Z-score. The autonomy index is created using four dimensions- women’s decision making, freedom of movement, financial autonomy and attitude towards domestic violence. Logistic regression models were used to test associations between indicators of female autonomy and the risk of having a stunted child.