Causes of stunting and wasting among tribal children.

Immediate causes

WHO and NFHS treat the immediate causes as inadequate diet, infection (diarrhoea, malaria, tuberculosis, measles) and poor maternal nutrition. Tribal diets that once used millets, forest greens, small game and mahua have thinned where Forest Acts, mining and PDS rice replaced diverse food. Exclusive breastfeeding may be short where mothers return to wage or forest work. Low birth weight starts the path to stunting.

Underlying biocultural causes

L. P. Vidyarthi’s nature–man–spirit complex is a food system: when jal, jungle, jameen shrink, child growth shrinks. Verrier Elwin already noted hunger in central Indian hills. Distance to anganwadi and PHC, language barriers, and distrust after coercive family-planning memories reduce uptake. Open defecation and unsafe water in hamlets raise enteric infection, which prevents nutrient absorption even when calories exist.

• Gender and birth order matter: girls and later children may eat last. Alcohol and distress migration leave children with grandparents. Sickle-cell and other haemoglobinopathies, more frequent in some ST groups, interact with malaria and anaemia. This is biocultural, not a racial defect.

Structural causes

Land alienation, PVTG isolation, and seasonal hunger before the harvest produce wasting spikes. NFHS-5 still showed very high stunting in parts of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and the central tribal belt. POSHAN Abhiyaan, ICDS, mid-day meals and PM-JANMAN for PVTGs address the gap; Xaxa Committee (2014) had already said delivery fails when the hamlet is off the road and the anganwadi worker is not local.

Do not reduce the problem to “tribal custom”. Custom includes complementary feeding knowledge that markets and displacement have broken.