Second national health survey doesn’t have much good news

The reasons are many, with the lack of women empowerment being a major reason. Fifty per cent women get married before the legal age of 18 years; over 60 per cent don’t work; 51.8 per cent married women don’t use any form of contraception, which is why they end up having more than two children, though 75 per cent said they don’t want more than two.

Malnutrition is a high 48 per cent among women in Orissa and 44 per cent in West Bengal, with six out of 10 women being anaemic. “Poor nutritional status of women is linked with poor child health, as it leads to low birth-weight, poor language and motor development and reduced scholastic achievements,” says Fred Arnold of ORC Macro, which provided technical guidance for the survey.

The nutritional status of children is worse. Three in four children are anaemic, with more than half of them suffering from moderate to severe amaemia. One in 11 children still dies before the age of five, with girls having an almost 50 per cent higher chance of dying than boys.

Almost half the children under the age of three are underweight, an indicator of the short- and long-term undernutrition. This is one of the major reasons why while infant mortality rate is down from 79 per 1,000 during NFHS-1 to 68 in NFHS-2, one in 15 children still die before the age of one.

On the other end of the spectrum is obesity among women, which averages 11 per cent among urban women across the country. It’s more common among women in Delhi and Punjab, with about 30 per cent of them being clinically obese.

One of the good news is that AIDS awareness has dramatically increased since NFHS-1 in some states, jumping up from 19 per cent to 61 per cent in Maharashtra, and from 23 per cent to 87 per cent in Tamil Nadu. Awareness is lowest in Bihar (12 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (20 per cent), Rajasthan (21 per cent) and Madhya Pradesh (24 per cent). Television was quoted by those polled as the most important source of AIDS information, followed by radio.

This is the second such survey conducted to build a demographic and health database for India, and was conducted by the Mumbai International Institute of Population Sciences. It was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), with support for the nutritional aspects from UNICEF.