Mortality during infancy and its Clustering in India

The level of infant mortality has been regarded as an explicit indicator to measure the extent of health problems associated with a population as well as its socio-economic development. Since the Indian states are quite diverse in the social, economic, cultural geographical and environmental conditions, they also differ in the pace of mortality transition. Some states have very less infant, neonatal and postnatal mortality like Kerala and while some has very high infant, neonatal and postnatal mortality like Madhya Pradesh. Although the overall infant mortality rate of India is declining, there is some retardation with the pace of decline of infant mortality rate. The present levels of infant and child mortality are quite high and need immediate attention. Consequently, for the policy makers, this remains a difficult task to tackle. National family health survey-1992-93, 1998-99 and 2005-06 data are used for the analysis. The result shows that there is clustering of infant deaths in the major Indian states and it is not uniformly distributed with different socio-economic characteristics. Infant death clustering increased significantly over the time.