Wealth and education-based inequalities in minimum dietary diversity among children in India

Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD) is a crucial factor for children, as it enhances energy and nutrient intake, promoting optimal nutritional status, growth, and development. It consists of consuming a variety of food groups as the foundation for a healthy transition from infancy to adulthood. Only 23% of the children aged 6–23 months consumed MDD; therefore, the remaining children do not have MDD due to socioeconomic inequalities among households in India. Therefore, we aim to measure socioeconomic inequality in MDD and identify the contributing factors of inequality using the cross-sectional data of 8,156 children aged 6–23 months from the National Family Health Survey of India. We utilize several descriptive statistics, confidence intervals, and chi-squared tests for baseline analysis. Furthermore, we utilize Erreyger’s concentration index (ECI) and concentration curve to represent the MDD inequality, and subsequently, the ECI is decomposed to identify the contributing factors to inequality. The ECI value for inequality in MDD due to wealth status was 0.057. Decomposition analysis revealed that 47% of the inequality was contributed by wealth index, 34.07% by region, 32.8% by sanitation facility, 7.86% by birth order, and 3.06% by mother’s BMI. Similarly, the ECI value for MDD inequality due to maternal education was 0.034, and 56.70% of the inequality was attributed to region, 36.45% to wealth index, 22.81% to sanitation facility, and 5.06% to maternal education. To minimize the MDD inequality among children, nutrition-sensitive interventions should be integrated with efforts to address economic deprivation, maternal education, access to healthcare, safe sanitation, and informational reach.