Nutritional status of children in north-east India.

Though poverty is the main reason for the prevalence of undernourished children many of the countries in the developing world do not have enough resources to implement wide-scale poverty alleviation programmes. As such when looking for means to reduce and minimize undernutrition among children one needs to create cost-effective intervention programmes which can be implemented at the community level to develop child-raring and child-feeding practices. For a meaningful investigation into the feasibility of developing cost-effective community-level intervention programmes which can be implemented through the existing social support system there is an urgent need to study the determinants of undernutrition among children by using appropriate measures of the nutritional status of children. Keeping the foregoing emphasis on strengthening community-level intervention programmes this paper makes an attempt to identify child parental and household background determinants which have either a favourable or unfavourable bearing on the nutritional status of children. (excerpt)