Paternal migration and child stunting in India: An analysis of NFHS-5 data.

Parental income is vital in providing food security for children and adults alike. Due to the lack of employment opportunities in agriculture-dominant rural areas, people, particularly in lowand middle-income countries, are pushed to migrate to the service and construction sectordominant urban areas to meet their livelihood requirements. In recent decades, India has also witnessed large-scale internal migration that is primarily irregular and seasonal. Based on the 2017 Indian Economic Survey, internal migrants account for 1/5th of the labour force, i.e., 100 million people. Despite the humungous scale of this migration, the association between paternal informal migration and the nutritional status of the children is underresearched in India. Some studies show a positive association, while others show negative or no association. To reduce this evidence gap and respond to the inconclusive evidence, this study aims to explore this relationship using data from the National Family Health Survey 5 collected during 2019 and 2021. Contrary to studies that used earlier versions of NFHS datasets, our analysis considering recent data with a focus on the type of migration (informal, permanent vs. no migration) showed no association between migration and nutrition (stunting and underweight) in the adjusted model. However, our model that considered the interaction between wealth and migration status provided additional insights. The stunting risk was significantly lower among the middle and richer non-migrants or permanent migrants and only the most affluent temporary migrants compared to the poorest temporary migrants, suggesting the need for robust policies for children in lower and middle socio-economic groups that migrate temporarily. Our results also suggest that all groups have significantly lower odds of being underweight in the middle, richer and richest categories compared to temporary migrant families that are very poor. We argue that while NFHS-5 allows us to study the association between nutritional status and type of migration, we recommend dedicated national surveys to measure this association in real-time.