22 per cent drop in infant deaths in India: Study

India’s under-five child mortality rate dropped 22 per cent in the last 10 years, reputed international journal Lancet has said — a drop steeper than government and UN estimates. Chetan Chauhan reports. Too optimistic?

Updated on: May 30, 2010, 01:16:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s under-five child mortality rate dropped 22 per cent in the last 10 years, reputed international journal Lancet has said — a drop steeper than government and UN estimates. But this hasn’t been welcomed as good news as experts have found fault with the model used to come to this figure.

On May 25, Lancet unveiled a study that said under-five child mortality in the world dropped from 11.9 million deaths in 1990 to 7.7 million in 2010. The figure for India was 1.64 million annual deaths, way below the government’s Sample Registration System (SRS) and UN figure of 1.83 million.

The study covered 187 countries. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington used the Gaussian Process Regression model, not commonly used to make health predictions. “The SRS sample size (71.0 mn), arguably the world’s largest, helps provide robust estimates...” said Thomas Chandy, CEO, Save the Children.

“The huge drop is a result of changes in the figure for half-a-dozen countries such as India, Afghanistan, Angola and Nigeria where the data was inconclusive,” said Harvard University data analyst Kenneth Hill in the Economist.

“Modelling cannot replace actual data,” said India’s NSSO official. World Bank population expert Eduard Bos said the IHME had made a similar claim in 2007 using another model, which too had been challenged.

The study’s lead author and IHME head Christopher Murray said the data was valid.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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