What\'s Wrong with the Assessment of Nutritional Deprivation? A Tale of Rural India

The aim of the paper was to quantify the proportion f undernourished households in rural India, without relying on any particular calorie cutoff point. For that mean, RDA has been estimated at the household l evel, after adjusting for age and gender distribution of the se dentary household members. The two NSS rounds that p er ain to the years 2004-05 and 2011-12 are used here. An investig ation of the determinants of calorie deprivation le ads us to the finding that poor households, ST and OBC households, causal labour in agriculture, self-employed in nonagriculture and Christians have the highest probability of being calorie deprived. Among the backward states, higher incidence of nutritional deprivation persists among Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal. The legacy of high er calorie deprivation in leading states is not a cause of worr y. Lower the nutritional intake, higher will be the a bsorption level in Southern and Western states due to their improved w ays of living.