TN halves infant mortality rate; red flags for Kerala, Karnataka

In a rare breath of good news for India, several states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Karnataka haveshown significant decreases in infant mortality rate in the past decade.

India’s IMR now stands at 42–which is a third of what it was in 2003. The data is from the latest vital statistics data for 2012 collected under the Sample Registration Scheme by the Census office.

[caption id=“attachment_1177733” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  Representational image. PTI[/caption]

Tamil Nadu,with its relatively better run primary health services, has clearly emerged as a frontrunner in the reduction of infant mortality. The data shows that the IMR in Tamil Nadu’s has gone down by 51 percent.

Although rural IMR (46) in India is more than urban IMR (28), the wide gap seems to be declining. A Times of India article notes thatrural IMR declined by 30 percent compared to the urban decline of 28 percent since 2003.

More from Economy

Inflation likely to be a big focus area for budget 2024, say sources Explained: Will the Bank of Japan break tradition and raise interest rates?

However, in Karnataka the situation is opposite. Karnataka is the only big-population state where urban IMR has worsened, increasing by 4 percent despite a 40 percent decline in rural areas, reports TOI.

Quite surprisingly, two tiny states, Manipur and Goa now lead the country with an IMR of just 10, surging past Kerala at 12. Kerala, in fact, is one of the states whose IMR has marginally worsened, increasing by 9 percentover the last decade.

Although Madhya Pradesh is at the bottom of the listwith an IMR of 56, it too has shown a significant decline of 32 percent in the last ten years. Similarly,Odisha and Rajasthan, though features among the bottom five states, both have shown a high rate of decline - about 35% - in the past decade.