1. Original Scientific Paper
Abstract

Undernutrition has become such a global burden on public health that affects the progress of nation by affecting the health of rural as well as urban children of the country. In Indian context, the children of tribal population are most unprivileged and undernourished having lower scope of earning, health facilities, education and other fundamental facilities. Among all the Indian tribes Santal is the largest one which is mostly found across the eastern region of India and it is also a representative community of Rural India. Therefore, it is also very important to know their nutritional condition with great attention. Several nutritional studies have been done among the children of Santals, still data on malnutrition as well as nutritional status of Santal children across India is very limited to understand the nutritional aspect of this particular community. So this study is another attempt to enrich the understanding in the same context. To collect empirical data a cross-sectional study was conducted on 118 school children (59 boys and 59 girls of below 18 years) in Kalimati mouza under Ghatshila block of East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, India. To analyze the nutritional status of the Santal children three most reliable and widely used indicators (HAZ, WAZ and BAZ) have been employed here. In all the cases WHO recommended and internationally accepted age and sex specific cut off values have been followed to define nutritional condition of all the individuals. Student t-test found no significant difference in nutritional indicators of both sexes. Among all the study participants most of them are underweight (75.00%) and almost half of them are suffering from stunting (42.37%) and thinness (54.24%). In summation it is concluded that the Santal school children of Jharkhand have very poor nutritional condition and boys are in more vulnerable situation than girls.

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