An empirical analysis of maternal health data: A case study of India

摘要

India is leading all nations in number of maternal deaths. To reduce the national maternal mortality rate the government is doing efforts and has introduced many schemes like JSSK and JSY to create awareness towards the institutional deliveries and to benefit the rural women economically. Despite such programmatic efforts by Indian government the goal to achieve maternal mortality less than 100 per 100,000 live births is far away. To identify the limited success in maternal mortality reduction in India we have compared the maternal health indicators data with some demographic indicators data to rectify the problem. In this paper, we have carried out an empirical data analysis for maternal health in India using secondary data collected from NHRM-HMIS portal. The data is also collected from a statistical publication of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare which consists of most updated data of Annual Health Survey (AHS-4.) and District Level Household Survey (DLHS-4) on maternal health for period 2011–13. To carry out our data analysis we have used Tanagra, a data mining tool to visualize the realistic glimpses of maternal health indicators status in various states of India. In this study we have found that the maternal health status is remarkable in Kerala whereas the situation is totally reverse in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This has prompted us to state that if much more effort towards MMR reduction will be put on these states can improve the overall MMR rate of the nation as these states are highly female populated states of the nation.