Seasonal effects of water quality: The hidden costs of the Green Revolution to infant and child health in India

Abstract

This paper studies early childhood health in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, focusing on inequalities in anthropometric outcomes by religious adherence. India and Nepal have Hindu majorities, while Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim. Results confirm a relative Muslim advantage for children less than 12 months of age in height-forage and weight-forage z scores primarily in India, possibly reflecting better nutritional intake from a non-vegetarian diet and the positive health endowment of Muslim women who tend to be taller than Hindu women. However this advantage disappears beyond 12 months of age, at which point Hindu children in all three countries are found to have significantly better anthropometric outcomes than Muslim children. We report tests that rule out mortality selection and undertake falsification and robustness exercises to affirm these findings.

Religion and Health in Early Childhood: Evidence from South Asia

“…Children in developing countries are likely to be especially vulnerable to early health shocks given the prevalence of insults to health (nutritional, environmental, and toxic) and widespread adherence to behavior that may have harmful effects on children's health, such as fasting during pregnancy. Negative health shocks to children in developing countries have only recently begun to receive attention in the economics literature (Jayachandran 2009;Maccini and Yang 2009;Almond and Mazumder 2011;Currie and Vogl 2013;Brainerd and Menon 2014).We use a number of datasets to assess inequalities in child health by religion. Our main analysis uses several recent rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for India, Bangladesh, and Nepal to examine differences in child anthropometric measures by religion, age, and sex.…”

Agriculture for nutrition: direct and indirect effects.

“…Other research has examined specific biological mechanisms linking agricultural livelihoods to health. For example, Brainerd and Menon (2014) looked at the longstanding concern that excessive and inappropriate use of chemical inputs, particularly pesticides and herbicides, has harmful effects on health and nutrition. They found significant evidence of adverse impacts on maternal and child health, including birthweight.…”

Gender and inorganic nitrogen: what are the implications of moving towards a more balanced use of nitrogen fertilizer in the tropics?

“…A national study conducted in India (Brainerd & Menon, 2014), examining the impact of fertilizer agro-chemicals (defined here as any of the following: nitrogen, nitrates, phosphates, potassium, fluoride and chromium) in water on infant and child health, found that children exposed to higher concentrations during the first month after conception experience poorer health outcomes on a variety of measures. The study correlated data on the increase in fertilizer use over time in India, the differing timing of the crop planting seasons across India's states and fertilizer application, and the seasonally adjusted prenatal exposure of infants and children to N and phosphate in groundwater to isolate the impact of fertilizer agro-chemicals on child health.…”

“…At the other end of the spectrum, women farmers living in high N use environments experience a number of gendered impacts. Their health, and that of children, may be negatively affected by nitrites in water, for instance in paddy (Brainerd & Menon, 2014;Udeigwe et al, 2015). We suggest that moving towards a more balanced and efficient use of fertilizer N will significantly improve gender and social equity outcomes, though change will ultimately be reliant on significant shifts in locationally specific deep structures informing gender and social norms.…”