Infant Mortality Rate: Kerala safest state for newborns in India; IMR down to 6

New Delhi: Beating all odds and making remarkable progress in reducing the number of infant deaths, Kerala emerged as the safest place in India in saving newborn children.

According to the latest data released by National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for the year 2015-16, the Infant Mortality Rate - the number of children under the age of 1 who die for every 1,000 born – has been reduced to six, which is at par with the US and other developed nations on this measure.

If India (current IMR of 41) could reduce its IMR to 6 like Kerala, more than 7 lakh children could be saved every year.

The NFHS-4 report for 2015-16 unveiled by the Health Ministry was conducted after collecting information from 6 lakh households, 7 lakh women and 1.3 lakh men, and for the first time provide district level estimates.

"Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) declined from 57 to 41 per 1,000 live births between NFHS-3 (2005-06) and NFHS-4. IMR has declined substantially in almost all the states during the last decade. It dropped by more than 20 percentage points in Tripura, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Odisha.

"IMR substantially declined over the period from 79 per 1,000 live births in NFHS-1 (1992-93) to 41 per 1,000 live births in NFHS-4," Health secretary C K Mishra said.

The Health Ministry, which unveiled the NFHS-4 report for 2015-16, said the proportion of women who received at least 4 antenatal care visits for their last birth has increased by 14 percentage points from 37 per cent to 51.2 per cent over the decade (2005-15), while there has been a substantial increase of 20 or more percentage points in seven states.

Kerala had been struggling over the past decade to bring down the IMR to a single digit from 12 where it has been stuck since 2009, according to the Sample Registration Survey (SRS) conducted by the office of the registrar of census.

In the last NFHS carried out in 2005-06, Kerala's IMR was 15. Kerala's exceptional progress in bringing down the number of infant deaths to a single digit over the past decade is lower than that of countries like Russia (8), China (9), Sri Lanka (8) and Brazil (15).