Senior Fellow, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi, Email: sunil.mishra@ihdindia.org
*This paper is the outcome of post-doctoral work of the author which was sponsored by Indian Council for Social Science Research. The author is indebted to ICSSR.
Online Published on 04 August, 2022.
This paper explains the linkages of nutritional status, food security and the role of Public Distribution System in the context of food security status of the districts by using two major national secondary data bases i.e. NSS and NFHS. The findings show that in the highly secure districts, there has been a reduction in the proportion of households with the APL card, while the share ofBPL and AAY card-holding families increased. The study shows that the difference of calorie, protein and fat intake between households from highly food secure districts and highly food insecure districts is high and it increased over the period of time. It is also interesting to find that the consumption of calorie for the ST households belonging to the highly food secure districts is higher than that of the households belonging to highly insecure districts. It is found that over the studied period, the proportion of total calorie intake from PDS cereal has more than doubled. For highly secured districts, the proportion of increase was about 2.5 to 3 times, whereas for the highly food insecure districts, the proportion of change is more or less the same as in the case of highly food secured districts. The proportion of children having achieved MDD is highest among the secured districts (33 per cent) whereas among the highly insecure districts, it was seven percentage point lower. Proportion of children achieving MMF is highest in the secure districts (42.06 per cent), followed by highly insecure districts (39.5 per cent). The all-India achievement of Minimum Acceptable Diet (MAD) for boys and girls was at 8.96 percentage point in 2015–16. The proportion of children achieving MAD was highest in the secure districts followed by highly secured district. However, the achievement level is very low. Among highly insecure and insured districts, the proportion ofchildren having achieved MAD is below 10 per cent. Many studies estimate the households’ food insecurity in terms ofMPCE, which is an indicator ofwellbeing (Ogundari (2017), Mutabazi et al. (2015))
Food security, Nutrition security, Minimum dietary diversity, Minimum meal frequency, Minimum acceptable diet
