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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India should improve maternal health

India should improve maternal health

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published Published on Sep 22, 2010   modified Modified on Sep 22, 2010


Human Rights Watch, a leading rights group, has said the latest UN maternal mortality estimates contradict the claim made by New Delhi that it is 'on track' in meeting goals for reducing maternal mortality.

An assessment by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other UN agencies found that though India is 'making progress' in declining maternal mortality, it is not 'on track' in meeting its UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

The 2008 figures, the latest global estimates available, were released yesterday ahead of the UN Summit on Millennium Development Goals.

The UN agencies also found other neighbouring nations Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan accounted for 65 per cent of all global maternal deaths in 2008.

In May, New Delhi refuted the report of the UN special rapporteur on health and disputed his contention that India would fail to meet its UN goal for reducing maternal mortality.

''The Indian government should stop playing number games with women's lives,'' said Aruna Kashyap, Asia women's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The government continues to focus wrongly on the number of women who give birth in a health facility, known as institutional deliveries, as a measure of progress on maternal health. But this approach gives an erroneous picture about progress on maternal health, Human Rights Watch said.

The Indian government said maternal health in the country had considerably improved because 10 million women had given birth in health facilities in 2009 and in 2010. Under its flagship National Rural Health Mission and Janani Suraksha Yojana, the Indian government uses cash incentives to encourage women to give birth in health facilities.

The government does not, however, measure the numbers of women who survive the delivery and the post-delivery period, a much more accurate measure of success.

''Even as India proudly proclaims its progress on maternal health, for many women the tragedy of maternal mortality and morbidity continues. Repeated health system failures--poor transport, referral mechanisms, emergency obstetric care, and continued care in the post-partum period--hamper delivery of care to pregnant women,'' Human Rights Watch said.

In its 2009 report, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) assessed the functioning of India's safe motherhood programme in five states and concluded that it should not focus on promoting institutional deliveries alone. The report noted that in the absence of corresponding inputs for human resources, additional labour rooms and post-natal beds, drugs and other supplies, quality of services have been a major casualty in institutional deliveries.

UNFPA recommended that monitoring the quality of facilities should become an ''integral component'' of the safe motherhood programme and suggested that it carry out this change so that ''service providers and programme managers also appreciate the importance of the focus in the quality of services provided and don't see their role only as mere distributors of money.'' ''Accountability in maternal healthcare requires the Indian government to use the right indicators to measure progress and to make the needed changes,'' Kashyap said.


United News of India, 21 September, 2010, http://www.centralchronicle.com/viewnews.asp?articleID=47907


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