Geospatial variation and monitoring system for child malnutrition in India | |
| Author | Mandadi, Ranadheer |
| Call Number | AIT Thesis no.RS-19-23 |
| Subject(s) | Geospatial data--India Malnutrition in children--India |
| Note | A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems, School of Engineering and Technology |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Abstract | India is facing a serious threat of under-five year's child malnutrition despite of 50% increase in GDP since 1991 and yet the status of nutrition in India is worsening. There is still a challenge to improve malnutrition condition in India. Despite of the many programs of government, there is still a failure in the goal to achieve targeted reduction. The national average of malnutrition levels shows a large interstate variation across districts of India. Using the National Family Health Survey 3 and 4(2006-16), this study examines the spatial variation in malnutrition and the influencing determinants across states and districts of India. The spatial correlation and regression tools was used to examine the spatial dependency and spatial clustering of child malnutrition and its determinants, which were adopted from UNICEF conceptual framework. There is an improvement in malnutrition prevalence over past decade but was not a significant change because only the average value has changed. The very high prevalence of stunting wasting and underweight were occurring in 236, 472 and 370 districts. The univariate Moran's I statistics was 0.61, 0.506 and 0.699 for stunting, wasting and underweight respectively suggesting spatial heterogeneity of malnutrition in India. The hotspot patterns of malnutrition prevalence was not same for all the indicators, five states contribute more than 80% of hotspot districts (Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, lharkhand and Madhya Pradesh). The results of spatial error model suggest that maternal health such as low mother BMI, anemia during pregnancy, absence of antenatal care during pregnancy, early marriage and pregnancy and lack of improved sanitation facilities at household were found as the most common and influencing factor on the occurrence and prevalence of malnutrition in India. A comparison of the factors between NFHS- 3 and 4 showed that over a decade there was a change of the significant influencing factors for stunting, wasting and underweight. The Bivariate LISA explains that the geographical pockets were the maternal care is low malnutrition prevalence is high mainly clustered in west, central and east districts. Improvement of malnutrition was found in few clustered districts in south and northeast but the overall malnutrition condition of India is still in bad condition. There is also a variation in the malnutrition condition of rural and urban areas, where it is more in rural. Though, there were policies and intervention programs in combating malnutrition in the past decade, most of the programs failed to create an improvement because of the absence of suitability analysis in relation to intervention programs. The developed app promises a beneficial contribution by providing a real-time monitoring system and a handy tool in collecting data and information that can be stored immediately into a database and thus avoiding loss and error of data. |
| Year | 2019 |
| Type | Thesis |
| School | School of Engineering and Technology |
| Department | Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DICT) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Remote Sensing (RS) |
| Chairperson(s) | Tripathi, Nitin Kumar ; |
| Examination Committee(s) | Pal, Indrajit ;Mozumder, Chitrini |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | Asian Institute of Technology Fellowship |
| Degree | Thesis (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2019 |