In a worrying trend, big northern states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have shown significant upward swing in maternal mortality ratio (MMR) figures within a year's duration, indicating that motherhood has become only more unsafe in these states.
Compared to the period of 2014-16, MMR has gone up by 15 per lakh live births each in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the period of 2015-17, according to the recently released special bulletin on MMR by the Registrar General of India (RGI). MMR is the number of deaths of women during childbirth reported per lakh live births.
MMR, along with infant mortality rate (IMR) is considered important health indices as they indicate the situation of the health of women and children, nutritional status as well as the level of efficacy of the health services available to people.
According to the latest data for 2015-17, Madhya Pradesh has a MMR of 188 per lakh live births—the third highest in country. In 2014-16, the MMR for Madhya Pradesh, combined with Chhattisgarh, was 173. The MMR for UP has gone up to 216 in 2015-17 from 201 in 2014-16, when the figure was combined for UP and Uttarakhand.
The national average for MMR has gone down to 122 to 130 in the said period, a dip of eight points, which translates into about 2,000 additional pregnant women being saved in a year.
Though apparently the uptrend in the MMR in MP as well as UP is because this is first time that separate data has been given for bifurcated Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand states respectively, activists point out that calculations show that at least in case of Madhya Pradesh, the MMR would be around 174 in 2014-16 too, if Chhattisgarh population was not included.
“This means that the situation on the front of safe motherhood has actually worsened whereas the national average has shown improvement. Also in case of Madhya Pradesh, it has become the state with third worst MMR, while combined with Chhattisgarh, it was fifth worse in 2014-16,” Neelesh Dubey, health and child rights activist said.
Health officials in Madhya Pradesh were not immediately available for comments.
Interestingly in Bihar, the MMR remained static at 165 from 2014-16 to 2015-17, despite separation of Jharkhand state.
Assam worst, Kerala best
The latest MMR bulletin shows that in 2015-17 Assam had the worst MMR in the country at 229 per live births, a dip of 8 points from 237 in 2014-16. The state with best situation is Kerala with MMR of 42, a dip of 4 points from 46 in 2014-17.
One of the encouraging point in the special bulletin is that 11 states have achieved the ambitious target of MMR below 100/lakh live births. These states are Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Karnataka and Haryana.
