India shamed by high child mortality rate

The black spots for the Indian children are widespread with even districts in well-off states like Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka being on the worst performing districts’ list. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Sep 22, 2013, 04:10:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Just 81 districts in India accounted for more than one-third of child mortality below five years of age in 2012 and half of these deaths were of girls, a new study published in the international journal Lancet has said.

The black spots for the Indian children are widespread with even districts in well-off states like Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka being on the worst performing districts’ list.

The study on child mortality in 597 districts done by Indian and foreign academic institutes and published this Friday describes the finding as astonishing because it indicates that some parts of the country have not benefitted from the government’s interventions to reduce under-five child mortality.

Of the three districts where under-five child mortality has increased in 2012, two are in rich states -- Vadodara in Gujarat and Raichur in Karnataka. The third one is Jorhat in Assam. In all, six districts in Gujarat had high child mortality rate, five in Andhra Pradesh, three in Arunachal Pradesh, two in Jammu and Kashmir and one each in Himachal and Karnataka.

In 2012, 1.5 million under-five child deaths were reported in 597 districts of which 71% were in the nine poorer states, which accounted for half of India’s population.

Rayagada in Orissa had the highest under-five child mortality rate of 133 deaths for 1,000 live births, even more than an African country like Kenya. Sheopur in Madhya Pradesh was second worst with 130.8 deaths. Even Delhi’s neighbourhood town of Ghaziabad had a higher child mortality rate than Dibrugarh district in Assam.

The slow pace of reduction in under-five child mortality meant that India reported 57.3 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2012. Based on this finding, the study calculated that the country would miss the millennium development goal target (MDG) of 38 deaths for 1,000 live births. Only 222 of 597 districts are on track to meet the MDG by 2015 whereas the remaining would meet the target by 2020, the study said.

The study also showed that the probability of a girl dying within five years of her birth was higher than a boy. For 100 boys who die within five years of their birth, 131 girl deaths were
reported, the study based on government data for child mortality states.

“Female mortality at ages 1-59 months exceeded male mortality by 25% in 303 districts in nearly all states of India, totalling about 74,000 excess deaths in girls,” the study’s lead author Prabhat Jha said.

Uttar Pradesh had highest number of districts recording higher girl deaths than boys followed by Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan. The trend is also noticed to a lesser extend in richer states such as Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

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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