Social discrimination key factor in stunting among children, study shows

 Caste practices and other kinds of social exclusion reduce communities' access to maternal and child health, leading to more cases of stunting, says a new study

Vulnerable to social discrimination, children from Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Muslim families are more likely to experience stunting--a condition where the body height is less than the accepted range at a given age--says a new study. Even socio-economic advantages do not change the correlation between stunting and exclusion.

'The Missing Piece of the Puzzle: Caste Discrimination and Stunting', a July 2021 study by Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University's Center for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) and Rajesh Ramachandran of the University of Heidelberg, was aimed at understanding the impact of caste and socio-economic factors on stunting among children. It found that marginalized castes--SCs, STs, and Other Backward Classes (OBCs)--reported a higher prevalence of the condition because of the widespread and entrenched, though illegal, practice of untouchability. Among Muslim families too, stunting was common, regardless of social status.

The study is significant because so far the emphasis has been on researching the links between child malnutrition and poverty and the lack of access to resources. "While stunting in India is high overall, there is a great deal of difference by social identity and we need to focus on that and ask why rates of stunting differ by social identity," says Desphande.

Nearly one-third of all stunted children in the world are in India. This condition causes adverse outcomes later in life, especially impaired brain development, which leads to lower cognitive and socio-emotional skills and lower levels of educational attainment, IndiaSpend reported in August 2018. The lack of these skills has led to 66 per cent of the workforce earning less than it would otherwise have, as per a 2018 World Bank report.

Children in India are much shorter than those in 30 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the CEDA report pointed out. This dichotomy, wherein development does not necessarily result in better social indicators, is referred to as the "Indian enigma", comparable to the idea of the "south Asian enigma". India's average rate of stunting is 36 per cent while that of Sub-Saharan Africa is 31 per cent, the study pointed out.