Economic Analysis and Policy 50 (2016) 120–130 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economic Analysis and Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eap Full length article Analysis of child deprivation in India: Focus on health and educational perspectives Soumyendra Kishore Datta a,* , Krishna Singh b a Burdwan University, India b Department of Economics, B. B. College, Asansol, India article info Article history: Received 14 March 2015 Accepted 19 March 2016 Available online 24 March 2016 Keywords: Health deprivation Educational deprivation Nutrition Children Dropouts abstract Children in many societies are found vulnerable to adverse socio-economic conditions, which usually undermine their growth and rob them of schooling opportunities. Without the availability of proper nutritional diet and full immunization, children suffer from un- derweight, stunted and wasted growth relative to their age. Poverty also weakens health and educational development of children. Principal Component Analysis has been applied to calculate a health related deprivation index for children. A recursive simultaneous equa- tion framework has been used to explain the variation of health deprivation of children as well as educational deprivation across the major Indian states, on the basis of some iden- tified explanatory variables. The health deprivation index’s empirical analysis reveals that factors such as poverty, female literacy rate, low body mass index of mother and full an- tenatal care, have significant association with the level of deprivation. The dropout rate of children is considered as reflective of their educational deprivation. Household characteris- tics of the deprived children indicate that female literacy, poverty, availability of electricity, gender of household’s head, fuel collection activity and children health status significantly influence the extent of their educational deprivation. This calls for urgent implementation of different government schemes for promoting better health and education of children of identified poor and deprived families. © 2016 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction It is now well known that successful sustainable development of a country is influenced by the maintenance and future enhancement of the volume of productive capital. This productive capital is basically composed of human, physical and nat- ural resources. Of these, human capital assumes special importance as it drives the state of productive use of the other two types of capital for improved wellbeing of both present and future generations. In this context it can be said that the capabil- ity of children in present generations needs to be well maintained or improved over time. Unless they are enriched in terms of better health and educational attainments, their physical or mental growth may not be adequate for the sustainability re- quirements of a society. This is because today’s children are future performers in diverse fields. Adequate care is, therefore, * Correspondence to: Department of Economics, Burdwan University, Golapbag, Burdwan-713104, West Bengal, India. E-mail address: soumyendra_d@rediffmail.com (S.K. Datta). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eap.2016.03.003 0313-5926/© 2016 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.