Institutional Deliveries in India are on the rise

Annual Health Survey (2010-11) was conducted in 284 districts in nine states – Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Assam, and these states comprise of 48 percent of India’s population i.e. almost half of India was covered. This part of India was covered as in this part of India the most of the health indicators are believed to be at low ebb and high focus has been rendered in the National Rural Health Mission implemented by the Government.  The data has been collected for three years (2007-09) from the mentioned nine states.

Let us compare the institutional deliveries (%) undertaken for these nine states during 2005-06 (NFHS-3) and 2007-09 (AHS, 2010-11).

S.No.	State	Institutional Deliveries (%) 2005-06	Institutional Deliveries (%) 2007-09
1	Assam	22.4	57.7
2	Bihar	19.9	47.7
3	Chhattisgarh	14.3	34.9
4	Jharkhand	18.3	37.6
5	Odisha	35.6	71.3
6	Madhya Pradesh	26.2	76.1
7	Rajasthan	29.6	70.2
8	Uttarakhand	32.6	50.5
9	Uttar Pradesh	20.6	45.6

As could be seen that about 50% of India where indicators of infant and maternal mortality are worst placed as compared to other parts of India, have improved quite significantly in respect of percentage of institutional deliveries.  Now percentage of institutional deliveries is more than double for most of these nine states.  In respect of Madhya Pradesh it is now three times.  It is expected that significant increase in institutional deliveries might have been translated into improvements in Maternal mortality Ratios over the period for these states. Seeing the progress in these nine states in respect of institutional deliveries by adoption of JSY programme of Indian Government, one may easily say that the progress would also be quite a bit in other states of India too as the JSY is  being implemented throughout India.