Diets, Nutrition, and Poverty - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 339

undernutrition, caused by more recent food deprivation or illness; underweight is an
indicator of both acute and chronic undernutrition. Children whose measurements
fall below a certain threshold of the reference population, based on recent WHO stan-
dards, are considered undernourished: stunted, wasted or underweight (WHO, 2004;
WHO, 2006 a, b).
An important feature of these indicators is the overlap among them, indicating a need
for a more comprehensive measure of child undernutrition. Following the important
work of Svedberg (2000, 2007), and application by Nandy et al. (2005), we construct a
new aggregate indicator that encompasses all undernourished children, based on IHDS
(Gaiha, Jha, and Kulkarni 2010b). This is the composite index of anthropometric failure
(CIAF). The details are given in Table 13.7.
The results point to more pervasive anthropometric failure relative to conventional
indicators of being underweight, stunted, or wasted. The CIAF is about 59%.
Among the subcategories, stunting and underweight and stunting alone account for
well over half of the CIAF. Children who fail in all three dimensions (simultaneously
wasted, stunted, and underweight) account for a non-negligible share (13.5%).
The contrast between the poor and nonpoor children is striking. The CIAF is consid-
erably higher among poor children than among the nonpoor. However, the number of
poor children suffering from any of the anthropometric failures is considerably lower
than that of nonpoor.
Thus, the CIAF and its disaggregation into subcategories of undernourished 5-year-old
children reveal a grimmer story of child undernutrition than conventional anthropometric
indicators do. Not only is the prevalence of undernutrition in its diverse forms higher but
also simultaneous occurrence of anthropometric failures (e.g., stunting and underweight,
and stunting, wasting, and underweight) varies from moderate to high. Although poor
children in general are more vulnerable to these failures, it is nonpoor or (relatively) affluent
children who account for significantly larger shares of total undernourished children.

Table 13.7 Subgroups of Child Undernutrition and CIAF in 2004-05

Groups Share of under 5 children (%)

1. No Failure 41.36

2. Wasting Only 6.86

3. Wasting and Underweight 9.41

4. Wasting, Stunting and Underweight 7.92

5. Stunting and Underweight 19.80

6. Stunting Only 11.08

7. Underweight Only 3.57

CIAF (=2+3+4+5+6+7) 58.64

Source : Authors' calculations based on IHDS, 2004-05.