Nutritional status and concomitant factors of stunting among pre-school children in Malda, India: A micro-level study using a multilevel approach

BACKGROUND: Malnutrition was the main cause of death among children below 5 years in every state of India in 2017. Despite several flagship programmes and schemes implemented by the Government of India, the latest edition of the Global Nutrition Report 2018 addressed that India tops in the number of stunted children, which is a matter of concern. Thus, a micro-level study was designed to know the level of nutritional status and to study this by various disaggregate levels, as well as to examine the risk factors of stunting among pre-school children aged 36–59 months in Malda. METHOD: A primary cross-sectional quantitative survey was conducted using structured questionnaires following a multi-stage, stratified simple random sampling procedure in 2018. A sum of 731 mothers with at least one eligible child aged 36–59 months were the study participants. Anthropometric measures of children were collected following the WHO child growth standard. Children were classified as stunted, wasted, and underweight if their HAZ, WHZ, and WAZ scores, respectively, were less than −2SD. The random intercept multilevel logistic regression model has been employed to estimate the effects of possible risk factors on childhood stunting. RESULTS: The prevalence of stunting in the study area is 40% among children aged 36–59 months, which is a very high prevalence as per the WHO’s cut-off values (≥40%) for public health significance. Results of the multilevel analysis revealed that preceding birth interval, low birth weight, duration of breastfeeding, mother’s age at birth, mother’s education, and occupation are the associated risk factors of stunting. Among them, low birth weight (OR 2.22, 95% CI: 1.44–3.41) and bidi worker as mothers’ occupation (OR 1.92, 95% CI: 1.18–3.12) are the most influencing factors of stunting. Further, about 14 and 86% variation in stunting lie at community and child/household level, respectively. CONCLUSION: Special attention needs to be placed on the modifiable risk factors of childhood stunting. Policy interventions should direct community health workers to encourage women as well as their male partners to increase birth interval using various family planning practices, provide extra care for low birth weight baby, that can help to reduce childhood stunting. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-021-11704-w.