Child morbidity and breastfeeding status in India

Rajiv Ranjan, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Balram Paswan, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Breastfeeding improves the nutritional status of young children and reduces morbidity and mortality. Acute respiratory infections is a major causes of illness among infants and children and the leading causes of childhood mortality throughout the world and diarrhoea is the second most important killer of children under age five worldwide. This paper tries to look into status of breastfeeding, prevalence of diarrhoea and pneumonia and services utilized in India and examine the factors affecting the status of breastfed and utilization of health services for child morbidity. The data uses for this study is from RCH, 2002 survey. A large variation were found in the status of breastfed, prevalence of diarrhoea and pneumonia by most socio-economic characteristics from all strata in India irrespective of their socio-economic background. The results show that breastfeeding has direct impact on childhood diarrhoea.