Number Theory: Against a decade ago, are Indian kids eating better?

This is the last of a two-part series on share of Indians who eat 3 meals a day. The first part looked at the share of overall population eating 3 meals a day.

The first of this two-part series looked at the share of Indians who ate three meals a day in 2022-23 and found this number to be higher among the rich. This number had also improved compared to what it was in 2011-12. The final part of this series will analyse unit level data from the 2011-12 and 2022-23 consumer expenditure surveys to look at what has happened to the share of children who eat three meals a day. Because nutrition

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Against a decade ago, are Indian kids eating better?

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  Children eat better than adults across classes

  The 2022-23 HCES data clearly shows that the share of children (those in the 1-14 years age group) in an MPCE (monthly per capita expenditure ) class having three meals is always higher than the oversall share for the MPCE class. Across MPCE classes, the share of children who have three meals shows a much smaller variation than among adults. This suggests that household treat the nutrition and feeding of children with more importance than everyone else in the family.
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  However, the share of children eating three meals a day has fallen compared to 2011-12

  What is of concern is the fact that the share of children having three meals has fallen between the 2011-12 and 2022-23 surveys while this number has increased for the older population. Whether this is a result of worsening economic conditions or more and more children having food which technically does not count as a meal, would require greater investigation than what the survey can tell us. The statistic is slightly counter intuitive as nutritional status of children under five years shows an improvement in other surveys such as the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) during this period. The proportion of stunted, wasted, and under-weight children decreased by 2-4 percentage points between the 2015-16 and 2019-21 rounds of NFHS. To be sure, surveys such as NFHS only measure acute undernourishment and therefore a measure of how bad things are rather than how good they are on the nutritional front.
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  Largely because of fall in meals taken at home

  What is the reason for the fall in the share of children having three meals a day? Because survey data gives a break-up of numbers of meals from different sources over the last month, it is possible to get some idea about this question. A comparison of 2011-12 and 2022-23 data shows that the number of meals in a month by children aged 1-4 years and 5-9 years has fallen by 2.7 and 2 during the two surveys. These are the only two age-groups where the number of meals in a month has fallen between 2011-12 and 2022-23. The data also shows that a bigger reason for a fall in the number of meals by children in this age-group is a fall in the number of meals eaten at home.
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  The reason for children losing a full meal could be different in states

  The reason for a fall in the share of children eating three meals is unlikely to be the same across states. This is because the decline in the proportion of such children is not dependent on whether a state is rich or poor. Delhi and Odisha; Bihar and Haryana; Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh have registered a similar level of decline, even though their average MPCE levels vary widely.
• Inference

  To be sure, the above trend is expected from the previous part of the series, which showed that state can sometimes override class in determining the proportion of people who have three meals. There is another way of seeing this. Among 21 big states, people having two meals in 2022-23 in 16 states were part of households that spent more per capita on food on average than the households of people who have three meals. This was not the case in only five big states: Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Punjab, and Haryana. The weak correlation between overall consumption levels and change in share of children or adults eating three meals, as seen in the numbers in this two-part series, underlines the need for deeper and careful analysis of whether Indians are eating enough and well.