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Inequality of Opportunity in Indian Children: The Case of Immunization and Nutrition

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Abstract

Basic services which are essential for the overall development of a child should not depend on circumstances such as caste, religion, gender, place of birth, or other parental characteristics, which are beyond his/her control. This paper uses two rounds of Indian National Family Health Surveys and concepts of Inequality of Opportunity and Human Opportunity Indices to measure inequality arising out of unequal coverage of full immunization and minimum nutrition for Indian children. The results suggest overall high level of inequality of opportunity with substantial geographical variations. Changes in inequality of opportunity in the two services during 1992–1993 to 2005–2006 were mixed with some geographical regions outperforming others. The findings also call for substantial policy revisions if the goal of universal full immunization and minimum nutrition has to be achieved.

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Notes

  1. Details of states in each region have been provided in the subsection “dataset and estimation”.

  2. The inequality of opportunity and human opportunity indices were developed by Barros et al. (2009) (also, see Barros et al. 2008) for Latin American and Carribean countries. I don’t take any credit for the conceptual development of these indices. The notations are retained in order to maintain coherence.

  3. In a strict sense D is not defined when \( \bar{p} = 0 \). A close substitute D s , can be used where \( D_{s} = \frac{1}{{2\left( {1 - \beta } \right)}}\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {\beta_{i} \left| {\hat{p}_{i} - \bar{p}} \right|} \). The interpretation will change a little where it signifies the proportion of all opportunities which need to be rearranged as a proportion of number of children who don’t have access to an opportunity. However if \( \bar{p} \) is zero, then the dissimilarity index doesn’t make any sense, but the human opportunity index will become zero showing no availability of the opportunity at all (Barros et al. 2009, p. 83).

  4. The regression results were in expected direction. They can be provided on request.

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Acknowledgments

Author is indebted to Dr. Sripad Motiram for guidance and suggestions. Author is also indebted to Dr. Abhishek Singh for providing useful comments which helped immensely in improving the paper.

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  1. Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Gen. A. K. Vaidya Marg, Goregaon (E), Mumbai, 400065, India

    Ashish Singh

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Singh, A. Inequality of Opportunity in Indian Children: The Case of Immunization and Nutrition. Popul Res Policy Rev 30, 861–883 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-011-9214-5

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