Study of Nutritional Status and Schooling among Children of Construction Workers in Bangalore City

Construction workers are the migratory population belonging to an unorganized sector. Their children who move along with them are exposed to various health hazards at the sites, malnutrition being the most common. Being migratory they are unable to attend regular schools and hence a large number of them are out of formal schooling system.

To assess the nutritional status of the children of construction workers.

To find out the schooling status of these children.

It was a cross sectional study of 180 children living at two construction sites in Bangalore city. A predesigned questionnaire was used to collect the data about schooling status, morbidity, immunization and anthropometric measurements.

Of the 180 children, 56 were below the age of 5 years and 124 were in the age group of 6–15 years. Of the 124 children only 24(19.3%) of girls and 67(54%) of boys were attending school. Maximum number of children, 53 (29.5%) were suffering from upper respiratory tract infection. Of the 56 children below 5 years, 44(78.6%) were malnourished based on Gomez classification and of 124 children, 122(98.4%) were underweight as per their BMI calculations.

The number of children malnourished (78.6%) is very high as against the National figure of 48% (NFHS3) among under fives. There is a great need for mainstreaming these children in the current National Nutritional Programs to tackle the problem of malnutrition. Being a migratory population a large number of children (26%) were not attending school. Government and NGO's should have facilities for providing formal education to these children. Despite the ‘Building and construction workers (Regulation of employment and conditions of service) Act, 1996, that stipulates that if more than fifty female workers are employed, rooms should be provided for use of their children, there is no system to take care of these children at construction site1. Strict legislations to improve the living conditions of construction workers and access to health care and social insurance benefits for those working in unorganized sectors needs to be emphasized. More NGO's such as ‘Mobile Crèches’ in Mumbai and ‘Good Neighbors’ in Bangalore need to concentrate on these issues and develop a public private partnership to provide regular schooling and screening with regular follow-ups, for health related issues like malnutrition.