Indian Journal of Economics and Development, Vol 3 (12), December 2015 ISSN (online): 2320-9836 ISSN (Print): 2320-9828 Food consumption and nutritional intake in rural India: Emerging trends and patterns K. Antony Akhil 1 , Syam Prasad 2 1 Ph.D. Scholar, 2 Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod – 671 316, India. akhilantony488@gmail.com 1 , prasadnatural@gmail.com 2 Abstract Background/Objectives: This paper is concerned with the analysis of food consumption and nutritional intake in major states of India during 1993-94 to 2011-12. As the rural poor are more vulnerable than any stratum of population, their issues of food and nutrition security have been placed one in the policy agenda. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The present study is based upon the collection of secondary data. The secondary data will be gleaned from the reports on consumer expenditure by NSSO. The statistical tools like compound annual growth rate, linear extrapolation method and simple average, etc. will be used for analytical purposes. Findings: The state-wise analysis corroborates that Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal lag behind in terms of income growth which can be substantiated by their higher expenditure on food. Though the share of high value commodities has increased, its rate of increase was not sufficient to surrogate for the decline in cereal consumption. Our results do not support the debasement of calorie requirements particularly in rural areas. Application: An understanding of how many numbers or percentages of population are nutritionally deprived will ignite further studies in the area. Keywords: Food intake, Nutritional intake, calories, high value commodities, accessibility. 1. Introduction Food and nutrition security has been a topic of special interest to development economists for a long time. There is consensus among them that national food security is not parallel with household food security and it has to be viewed through the lens of accessibility rather than availability [1]. Thus famines might happen as a result of weak accessibility or weak access to PDS especially by the rural population [2]. As the rural poor are more vulnerable than any stratum of population, their issues of food and nutrition security have been placed one in the policy agenda and in academic circles [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The studies on nutrition literature suggest that it is illogical if one tries to delink nutrition security from food security. A major distinction between food consumption and nutrient intake lies in the fact that consumption is behaviour, and nutrient intake is an outcome of the consumption behaviour. The link between food consumption and nutrition is far complex. The plausible explanation follows that both quantity and quality of food is important for ensuring nutrition security. The nutritional intake of a household is often measured in average calorie intake, which represents the conversion of food intake into usable energy. The quality of food or the conversion of food intake into usable energy is supplemented by the factors such as safe drinking water, health care and environmental hygiene [8]. In addition to the aforesaid factors, food prices, incomes of the poor, nutrition education and adequate care to women and children will determine the level and quality of food intake and ensure food security for all members of the household. Various studies have pointed to the corruption, leakages and inefficiencies in the functioning of various employment-oriented programmes and food-related schemes. Studies have also confirmed that the Food Security Act is in sleeping mode and working with uneven success in most of the backward states such as Bihar [9, 10]. As the Food Security Act is not working properly, the limited access to the PDS would have worsened the nutritional security of the households. Hence an understanding of the food consumption pattern of the rural population becomes pertinent particularly when food prices escalated during 2007-2008. The first section of the paper provides an 1 www.iseeadyar.org