title: Nutritional disparities among women in urban India.
abstract: The paper presents a wealth quartile analysis of the urban subset of the third round of Demographic Health Survey of India to unmask intra-urban nutrition disparities in women. Maternal thinness and moderate/ severe anaemia among women of the poorest urban quartile was 38.5% and 20% respectively and 1.5-1.8 times higher than the rest of urban population. Receipt of pre- and postnatal nutrition and health education and compliance to iron folic acid tablets during pregnancy was low across all quartiles. One-fourth (24.5%) of households in the lowest urban quartile consumed salt with no iodine content, which was 2.8 times higher than rest of the urban population (8.7%). The study highlights the need to use poor-specific urban data for planning and suggests (i) routine field assessment of maternal nutritional status in outreach programmes, (ii) improving access to food subsidies, subsidized adequately-iodized salt and food supplementation programmes, (iii) identifying alternative iron supplementation methods, and (iv) institutionalizing counselling days.
authors.affiliation: Urban Health Resource Centre, New Delhi I 10 029, India. siddharth@uhrc.in
authors.forename: Siddharth
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Agarwal
authors.affiliation: Urban Health Resource Centre, New Delhi I 10 029, India.
authors.forename: Vani
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sethi
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000740:Anemia / Q000453:epidemiology; D015984:Causality; D015897:Comorbidity; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India / Q000453:epidemiology; D044342:Malnutrition / Q000453:epidemiology*; D039382:Maternal Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D008875:Middle Aged; D009752:Nutritional Status; D011203:Poverty / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011247:Pregnancy; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013851:Thinness / Q000453:epidemiology; D014505:Urban Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D055815:Young Adult