- Authors: Dean Spears, Diane Coffey
- Published in: Seminar Magazine
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Abstract
Children in India are much shorter than children in other countries. More disturbingly, they come across as much too short according to international norms for populations of healthy children. Adivasi children are even shorter, on average, than other children in India. This gives rise to two questions. First, why are adivasi children so short? And second, why are they shorter than children in other population groups in India? We will primarily discuss existing results in the literature, but will also illustrate these sometimes technical findings with simple analysis of data on child height. Our discussion of the second question – why are Scheduled Tribe (ST) children shorter than other children in India – draws heavily on research that we have done in collaboration with Ashwini Deshpande and Jeff Hammer. Our research shows that while the ST-general and Scheduled Caste (SC)-general child height gaps in India are almost identical, the ST-general gap can be completely accounted for by observable differences in wealth and material resources, but the SC-general gap cannot. This is because STs tend to live in different places than other groups, and are therefore exposed to different threats and resources. SCs, in contrast, are more likely to be mixed into the same villages as higher castes. These results suggest that the ST height gap is no special puzzle: ST children are shorter than general children primarily because they are poorer and live in more remote places with fewer resources.