India is home to some 120 million children under the age of 5, 36 percent of whom are chronically malnourished. The associated high prevalence of stunting has generated a stream of research explaining why chronic malnourishment in India is higher than in poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Surprisingly, this body of research has overlooked a crucial feature of chronic malnourishment in India – that is, the difference in stunting incidence across caste and religious groups.
A comparison by social categories reveals that not only are the height gaps between social groups in India two to three times larger than the India–Africa gap, but that children from the socio-economically dominant group, the upper caste Hindus, are even taller than their African counterparts. We find significant caste gaps in child height in samples that are balanced on an extensive set of covariates. We also show that height gaps are higher in areas where discrimination is more prevalent. Our results suggest that incorporating considerations of caste is essential to understanding the problem of chronic malnourishment in India today.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.