Pathway from Nutrition status to household income among elementary workers in India

Despite the consistent effort to reduce hunger and poverty, a sizeable proportion of the population in India is living below the poverty line and 36% women and 34% men were underweight (IIPS & Macro International, 2007). Malnutrition and poverty form a vicious circle of poverty which needs to be removed through government intervention. In the context, using data from the national representative “level and pattern of consumer expenditure survey” (66th Round 2009-10) of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) we have tried to establish the association between nutrition status and household income. In order to take into account the heterogeneous effect of the calorie intake across the income distribution and endogeneity of the calorie consumption we have applied instrumental variable quantile regression. Regression result confirms the heterogeneous impact of per-capita calorie intake across household income distribution. Result shows that the marginal effect of per consumer unit calorie intake on income decreases with the increase in income. Calorie intake elasticity of income gain is 2.077 at the lowest 10th quantile than the 1.755 at the highest 90th quantile of income distribution. Study clearly shows that public intervention at the low level of nutrition intake will have relatively higher gain in income.