Caste disparities are an important factor behind India having higher rates of stunting among children than sub-Saharan Africa despite the country being relatively richer, a study published on October 26 in the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy has found.

The study, authored by economists Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran, found that children from historically marginalised communities such as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were 50% more likely to be stunted than those from upper castes.

The rate of stunting in children from upper caste groups was found to be 27%, which is significantly lower than sub-Saharan Africa’s 34% and India’s 36% overall.

Child stunting refers to the phenomenon of a child being too short for their age. and is the result of chronic or recurrent malnutrition.

Deshpande is the head of the economics department at Haryana’s Ashoka University while Ramachandran is a senior lecturer at Monash University Malaysia. Their study argues that caste needs to be explicitly accounted for in any policy that seeks to address the high rates of stunting in India.

The prevalence of stunting in India in 2022 was 31.7%, as against 31.3% for sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates published by the United Nations Children's Fund, World Health Organization and World Bank.

This was despite the fact that India’s per capita gross domestic product in 2022 was $2,393 (Rs 2.01 lakh), as compared to $1,701 (Rs 1.43 lakh) in sub-Saharan Africa.

Deshpande and Ramachandran’s study – based on a nationwide household survey covering 2 lakh children under the age of five – notes that children in sub-Saharan Africa “face a worse disease environment and have access to fewer calories” than those in India.

The study also notes that India has a higher rate of stunting despite these factors, referring to this phenomenon as the “Indian enigma”. However, the authors said that the paradox disappears “when restricting the comparison to the non-stigmatised caste group children to the SSA [sub-Saharan African] children”.

In essence, if children from only dominant castes in India were to be compared with their counterparts in the African region, they would no longer be worse off in terms of being too short for their age.

The study noted that this finding was not surprising, as children from better-off groups would have better access to food and would face fewer diseases. However, even after accounting for differences in socio-economic status, the child height differences across caste or tribe groups in India remained significant, it found.

The research paper based its findings on India’s national health and demographic surveys from 2019 to 2021. For comparability, it analysed data from all sub-Saharan countries for which information was available from 2015 onwards.

“Our results show that the gaps between the groups in India dwarf the India-SSA [sub-Saharan Africa] stunting gap,” the study said. It said that it was important to take social identity into account to combat child stunting in India.

Also read: Why isn’t India's shocking malnutrition problem shaking up its politics?