Indian children are on the shorter side when compared with children of other similar countries.
Bias for the boy child, seen often in India, is the chief factor responsible.
There’s often talk about how over the last 50 years the Japanese and Koreans have grown taller on average. But have you noticed how short Indian children are? Or, how first-born children tend to be smarter than their younger siblings?
A couple of data-happy economists, Seema Jayachandran and Rohin Pande, have studied just that. Their findings were published a couple of years ago in a paper titled ‘Why Are Indian Children So Short?’ They say the preference for sons ensures that the gradient from the first to the last child is steeper than in other comparable regions of the world.
In most of the developed world, economic growth has been associated with an increase in the height of the population. This trend, however, has failed to establish itself in India and Africa, the two regions under consideration in the study. The paper finds that between 1992 and 2005, India’s economic growth was higher than 6 per cent per year – resulting in a higher per capita GDP than over 100 countries; yet the rate of stunting among children in India in 2005 was a shocking 40 per cent, the fifth-highest rate in the world.
According to the paper, this could in large part be due to the preference for sons, the desire for that son to be healthy, and the consequent inequity in resources allocated between the eldest son and the subsequent siblings, whether boy or girl.
If a family’s first-born child is a son, then the family will spend a large proportion of their resources in keeping that child healthy and well-fed, and will naturally have fewer resources for the subsequent children. This follows the hypothesis that first-borns are taller and healthier.
However, the stark preference for a boy over a girl has an interesting – if unfortunate – effect on this trend. If a family expects to have two children and the first happens to be a girl, then the paper hypothesises that the parents will allocate fewer resources to the girl in the hope that the next child will be a son. They also tend to conserve their resources because they feel that, with the first child being a girl, it is increasingly unlikely that their desire for a son will be fulfilled within their target of two children.
Now, if the second child is also a girl, then she receives even fewer resources because not only is she not the eldest, but now the family will have to try for three children in order to have a son. And once the son is born, he is showered with all the resources the parents can afford to spend as he is considered an asset, while the girls are viewed as a drain on the resources.
The paper states, optimistically, that “one might expect unequal allocation in the household to matter less as India develops”, but then goes on to find that when households are compared by wealth, the birth order gradient is actually relatively large among wealthier households.
“Thus, India appears to still be far from the level of wealth at which, despite unequal allocation, children are all sufficiently nourished.
“This implies that even as India develops, the problem of malnutrition might be slow to fade, unless policies are put in place that influence or counteract the intra-household allocation decisions that parents are making,” the paper says, which is a sad commentary on the current state of India.
Quite apart from the differences in allocation of food within households, about which Amartya Sen had written in 1983, India faces a much larger problem of malnutrition. The average IQ (intelligence quotient) in India is now below 90, which is a significant challenge for developing a properly skilled workforce.
It is not clear if there is enough awareness of the problem that this creates because the dependency ratio will increase not only because of demography but also intelligence. There is an urgent need to address this problem by ensuring enough supply of protein to children between the ages of one and 10. Just a glass of milk and a banana or an egg every day will do. Perhaps this should be made a compulsory element of corporate social responsibility. Agencies like Akshay Patra can be entrusted with the task.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.