Opinion Don’t ignore context of NFHS data
Meeta Rajivlochan writes: When all the indicators are considered, they show a significant empowerment of women in India.
The NFHS-5 shows significant empowerment of women. 
-
Share -
-
-
The article ‘When numbers hide’ (IE, December 7) by Amitabh Kundu of Oxfam and P C Mohanan, the statistician, smacks of dishonesty. Its tone is quite in harmony with the general fashion to lambast India for various sins, imagined and uncommitted. Those who follow this fashion try to undercut any positive information about India with heavy qualifications, as if setting up qualifiers would somehow dilute the force of the changes that are happening. The simple fact is that data on its own is neither here nor there. On its own, no datum says anything. It makes sense within a context only.
Permit me to draw the attention of the readers to some data on women and public health in India to see how this works.
In the article, the writers devote much attention to questioning the single indicator of an improvement in the sex ratio of the total population. Now, as the writers also know, data sets are examined with respect to a group of indicators rather than only one indicator. Simply put, this means that various related indicators of total sex ratio, life expectancy of women, incidence of institutional deliveries, total fertility rate, mothers who had an antenatal check-up in the first trimester and so on should be examined. If all such indicators show an improvement over the previous survey, it suggests an improvement at ground level.
This is just what the NFHS-5 does show — improvement across the board. That institutional births went up from 78 per cent to 88 per cent, that neonatal mortality and infant mortality reduced by 5 per cent, etc, is part of the total picture. To question the validity of one indicator and ignore all the rest does not show that the data itself is questionable. It does show that the user of the data is. It is anyone’s guess what such wilful blindness to information, which does not fit in with the writers’ analysis, says about the writers.
Actually, what the NFHS-5 does show is the significant empowerment of women. Thus, the percentage of women who have a bank or savings account that they themselves use has gone up from 53 per cent to 78 per cent in the past five years. The proportion of women who participate in major family decisions went up from 84 per cent to 88 per cent for the same period.
It is all this information put together which gives us a sense of how society in India is moving. To ignore all this and harp on just one piece of information is meaningless.
Yet, for some time now, this has been the favoured strategy of those who write on such matters. The reporting on the pandemic in India was a good example. In The Inequality Report 2021: India’s Unequal Healthcare Story published by Oxfam, it is admitted that India at 1.1 per cent had one of the lowest case fatality rates for Covid-19 as compared to far richer countries like the US and France (1.8 per cent) or Germany and Belgium (2.4 per cent) but this is immediately qualified with the statement that “the low case fatality rate of India is probably due to the demographic dividend which is tilted more towards younger population.”
The report then proceeds to lambast India’s low hospital beds to population ratio and such other indicators. That given such constraints and given the state of the infrastructure, the medical providers in India had done a rather good job, is never acknowledged.
This column first appeared in the print edition on December 9, 2021 under the title ‘A wider view’. The writer is an IAS officer. Views expressed are personal
-
Share
-
-
-
Share
