Title of the Paper - Migration and Child Health: Exploring Disparities in Child Nutrition and Immunization in Urban India

Migration and health share a complex relationship and interactions. The increasing urbanization and rural to urban migration provides a scope to analyze the health and nutrition status of migrants living in urban India. The present study tries to understand disparities in child immunization and nutritional status among children by migration status in urban India using the most recent available data of National Family Health Survey (2005-06). Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression models were used to study the levels and factors associated with child nutrition and immunization by migration status. Results suggest that malnutrition and no immunization are very high among children of rural to urban migrants and full immunization is lower than urban non-migrants and urban-urban migrants. More than half of the children from of marginalised households suffer from the problem of undernutrition among rural-urban migrants. Multivariate results show economic status economic status, age of the mother, education, caste and media exposure are negatively associated with malnutrition and positively associated with immunization. Children from south, north-east and east have lesser chance of being malnourished than north region of India. 1 Kunal Keshri (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Assistant Professor, G. B. Pant Social Science Institute, University of Allahabad, Jhusi, Allahabad 211019, Uttar Pradesh, India. URL: http://www.gbpssi.nic.in/institute/faculty.htm, Email: [email protected] 2 Ranjan Kumar Prusty, Senior Research Fellow, International Institute for Population Sciences, Deonar, Mumbai400088, India. Email: [email protected]