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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

‘Prioritise marginalised communities'

‘Institutional delivery wrong measure of maternal health'

Approximately 1.83 million children under five die every year

As world leaders gather in New York to debate how countries have fared on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), nearly 15,000 children under five will die in India — mostly from treatable diseases like pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and complications at birth.

Save the Children, a non-profit organisation working for children, has urged India to show leadership and end the preventable trend of 1.83 million deaths of children under the age of five that occur each year.

“We've made some progress in tackling poverty, and improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the past decade but the child and maternal mortality goals are the most off-track, of the eight global commitments world leaders made in 2000,” Thomas Chandy, CEO of Save the Children, said. Despite progress in reducing maternal mortality and child mortality, India still ranks first out of the 12 countries that account for two-thirds of toddler and maternal deaths in the world. Approximately an estimated 67,000 women lose their lives due to pregnancy or childbirth complications.

In India, the annual rate of decline in child mortality between 1990 and 2008 has been 2.25 per cent. As per the 2015 target, the country needs to reduce toddler mortality to 39/1000. The required rate of decline from 2009 to 2015, per year, has gone up to 6.28 per cent.

Save the Children calls upon the world's leaders to step up their efforts to reach the goals, and says that they cannot do this by leaving the poorest children behind. Governments must focus on the barriers that stop the poorest children from getting access to the health care and nutrition that will improve their chances of survival.

Save the Children's research shows that prioritising marginalized and excluded communities, especially in States lagging behind, is one of the surest ways that India can reduce the number of children dying of easily preventable causes. The National Rural Health Mission, for example, should have a clear focus on social inclusion of Dalits and Adivasis in terms of access to health care.

Meanwhile, the new UN global maternal mortality estimates contradict the Indian government's claim that it is “on track” to meeting UN goals for reducing maternal mortality, Human Rights Watch has said.

An assessment by the WHO and other U.N. agencies found that even though India is “making progress” in curbing maternal mortality, it is not “on track” to meeting its goal. The 2008 figures, the latest global estimates, were released in advance of the U.N. Summit on MDGs.

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