The findings of the Global Burden of Disease 2015 study are truly depressing. The results, published in The Lancet, lists the main factors behind illness, death and disability in countries.
While deaths of children under five years has gone down between 1990-2015 from 12.1 million to 5.8 million, India still tops the number of child deaths at 1.3 million in 2015.
India is followed by Nigeria, which has over seven lakh deaths, and Pakistan with three lakh deaths. Bangladesh has done better. There were 7663 maternal deaths in 2015 in Bangladesh, which is a dramatic improvement from 21,789 in 1990. Maternal deaths in India dropped by half to 63,861 in 2015 from 1,32,239 in 1990
Neonatal mortality, which is death in the first 30 days of life, remains high. While deaths under five years have reduced, it still remains way lower than the MDG goal.
Some of the main causes given in the study are pre-term birth complications, trauma and respiratory infections. Diarrhea-related diseases are the fourth leading cause.
The study says that while government schemes like Janani Suraksha Yojana have been successful in improving access to institutional births, the reach remains patchy with large parts of rural India unable to access the services. This is the demography that remains most vulnerable. A reality we encounter everyday in news reports of pregnant women dying on their way to hospitals.
Clearly, it is time to step back and take a close, hard look at our flagship programs like JSY and the integrated child development scheme, ICDS. The ICDS was launched in 1975 and is one of the world’s oldest nutrition programs. If after 41 years of ICDS, we are still failing so many hundreds of thousands of children, something is clearly going very wrong.
