Nutritional Aspects of Poverty among Casual Labourer Households in Shillong (India)

In this paper we report our findings as to the extent of poverty among the casual labourers of Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya, India. Two views of poverty have been considered; first at the per capita (per month) income level and the second at the nutritional level. Nutritional level has been defined in terms of calorie, carbohydrate, protein and fat intakes of the casual labourer households. We find that income elasticites of calorie availability and carbohydrate availability move close to each other. Income elasticities of protein are always higher than carbohydrate (and calorie). Elasticities of fat are initially larger than others, but with an increase in per capita income they slide down others. At small income levels relatively high-fat-low-protein articles are consumed while with an increase in income relatively low- fat-high-protein articles are consumed. The contribution of carbohydrates to calorie intake decreases with an increase in per capita income. Our findings do not corroborate Behrman and Deolalikar (1987), who showed that the income elasticity of calorie intake was quite low, and not significantly different from zero in statistical terms. If the income elasticity were close to zero, its implication is that improvement in the income of the poor will have little impact on the extent of malnutrition. Then the developmental policies intended to improve nutrition will have to use policy instruments which attack malnutrition directly rather than relying simply on raising income. But that is not the case as shown by our study. However, our findings support Strauss and Thomas (1990), Ravallion (1990). Bouis and Haddad (1992), and Subramanian and Deaton (1996), who find that income elasticities of energy component of food, although small, are yet significantly different from and much larger than zero. Subramanian and Deaton (1996), based on the National Sample Survey data, estimated the expenditure elasticity of calorie intake to lie in the range of 0.3-0.5 and in any case statistically different from zero. In our study, we find that income elasticities of calorie availability (to casual labourers in Shillong) are close to 0.4, which corroborate Subramanian and Deaton. We also find that not only calories, but other nutritional ingredients of food such as carbohydrate, protein and fat availabilities (intakes) also have income elasticities significantly larger than zero and, therefore, raising income to Rs. 800 (per capita per month) or so we may overcome the mal-nutrition problem among the poor.