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Does Food Security Influence the Nutritional Status in India? Empirical Evidences From State-Level Cross Sectional Study

The Indian economy is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. While it achieved self-sufficiency in food production, India ironically also harbours the largest population in the world suffering from malnutrition-. This paper examines the food security status across the Indian states, by constructing an index comprising 17 indicators developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which represents food availability, affordability and quality, and safety. Information from multiple government sources and research reports were combined to develop a comprehensive food security index for 2015-16. By extracting National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-16) data, body mass index and anaemia-based indicators were analysed to study the nutritional status of children and adults across the states. A multivariate linear regression model was employed to explore the relationship between nutritional outcome and food security of the population. Empirical evidence suggests that increase in food security index by one percent would significantly decline the incidence of stunting and underweight respectively by 0.5 and 0.6 percent among children and about 0.4 percent in case of adults underweight, after controlling for state dummy.