
NEW DELHI: Next month, when India’s 543 new Members of Parliament are announced, they will have a handy tool to help the masses they represent —the first-ever mapping of their respective constituencies for nearly 100 development indicators related to health, nutrition, and household profiles.
The mapping has been done by researchers at Harvard University in the US and the Institute of Economic Growth and Tata Trusts in New Delhi to give the parliamentarians an idea of areas that need to be prioritised. The analysis has thrown up shocking data on indicators such as childhood malnutrition, stunting, wasting and anaemia in children, which shows that over 42 per cent of the children under 5 in all 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in Jharkhand are underweight. In Singhabhum seat in the state, this percentage touches an alarming 61. Similarly, 49-76 per cent of children in Uttar Pradesh, spread over 80 constituencies, are anaemic.
In India, data on key developmental indicators that inform policies and interventions is available for administrative units or districts, but not for political units. “For the first time, MPs can easily and clearly know how their constituencies are performing on a whole host of indicators related to health, nutrition and development,” said S V Subramanian, professor of population health and geography at Harvard University and lead researcher on the project.
“This resource will also help other stakeholders, such as the constituents, to identify and prioritise issues that they take up with their MPs for action.”Researchers said that the absence of constituency identifiers in nationally representative surveys or the Census so far had prevented assessment of how a constituency was doing with regard to key development indicators.
The indicators on which the constituencies have been assessed include population of women over 6 who ever attended school, sex ratio of the total population, sex ratio at birth for children born in the last five years, households with electricity connection, and hospitalisation rates.
For the health and nutrition profiles of the constituencies, several indicators have been included in the categories of marriage and fertility, current use of family planning methods, maternity care, delivery care, treatment of childhood diseases, nutritional status of adults and anaemia among children and adults. In the analysis, certain patterns appeared to be common. In the same state, differences emerged between constituencies.