-The Hindu India has the highest number of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths among children globally, reports the International Vaccine Access Centre (IVAC) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The 2015 annual report of the IVAC reads like a repeat of last year’s report card, despite the progress the country is making to accelerate immunisation. With 2,97,114 deaths, India is once again at the top of the list of countries with...

The country has made significant gains in raising the rate of exclusive breastfeeding among infants from 46 to 65 percent between 2005-06 and 2013-14. This has been revealed by the 2015 Global Nutrition Report, which was released by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in September. The report has quoted preliminary data on nutrition, which was collected via the Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC) in 29 states by the...

-PTI Nearly half of the infant deaths are tied to malnutrition, and 45 per cent occur during the first 28 days of life. Houston: Nearly 5.9 million children will die before their fifth birthday this year mainly of preventable causes, a UN report has warned, though the child mortality rate has fallen by more than 50 per cent since 1990. The mortality rate among children under five has fallen from 12.7 million...

-Down to Earth A report blames ineffective policies, lack of budget and the absence of better monitoring policies for poor performance India has shown little improvement in breastfeeding infants and ensuring healthy diet to young children, a report by the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) and the Public Health Resource Network (PHRN) says. The study blames gaps in the implementation of government policies for the dismal performance. Since 2004, the report...

-The Hindu The Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana was introduced to provide partial wage compensation during pregnancy, but various issues plague its implementation The latest official figures indicate that India is well short of meeting the Millennium Development Goals that pledged to reduce the country's maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by three quarters and the infant mortality rate (IMR) by two-thirds. The Sample Registration System (SRS), 2013, records MMR at 167 per 1,00,000...