IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jdevst/v57y2021i5p750-771.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

He Has Gone to a Better Place, but She Has Not: Health Status of Hindu Widows in India

Author

Listed:
  • Ayush Agrawal
  • Chitwan Lalji
  • Debayan Pakrashi

Abstract

Using detailed individual and household-level data from the first two rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) conducted in 2004–05 and 2011–12, this paper estimates the health gap that exists between married and widowed women from Hindu households. We use the most commonly used anthropometric indicators of nutritional status in adults – body mass index and incidence of underweight – to estimate and decompose the gap in health outcomes that exists between these two groups of women. The overall results presented in this paper suggest that widows from Hindu households have significantly lower body mass index and higher incidence of underweight compared to their married counterparts and also experience high levels of discrimination. Access to various government welfare schemes and increased autonomy, however, is found to offset the detrimental health effects of widowhood to a large extent.

Suggested Citation

  • Ayush Agrawal & Chitwan Lalji & Debayan Pakrashi, 2021. "He Has Gone to a Better Place, but She Has Not: Health Status of Hindu Widows in India," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(5), pages 750-771, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:57:y:2021:i:5:p:750-771
    DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2020.1802008
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2020.1802008
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00220388.2020.1802008?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pragati, & Thakur, Sounak, 2023. "Mother’s widowhood and children’s education: Evidence from India," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 232(C).
    2. Hossain, Babul & James, K.S., 2024. "Economics of widowhood mortality in adult women in India," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 340(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:57:y:2021:i:5:p:750-771. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FJDS20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.