In the past, India was known as a very poor country, where the public health system was almost non-existent, and where huge numbers of children died from diseases such as diarrhoea. There are still many problems with poverty in India, but the healthcare system has improved from before. Among other things, people in India have become much better at saving newborns and young children. This is shown by the latest figures from the World Health Organization WHO. The figures show that between 1990 and 2020, child mortality fell by an average of 4.5 per cent each year. In 1990, almost 3.5 million Indian children under the age of five died, in 2020 the number fell to less than 800,000. According to the major Indian newspaper The Economic Times, the progress was greatest in the states of Karanataka and Uttar Pradesh, which are some of India’s most populous areas. Over 200 million people live in Uttar Pradesh alone. The newspaper also writes that the fall means that as many as 11 Indian states and territories have now met the UN’s sustainability goal of saving more children from dying. One of the ambitions in the 17 sustainability goals is that the number of deaths among children under the age of five should fall below 25 deaths for every 1,000 live births. But it is part of history that the 25 out of 1,000 is only the minimum target to be able to say that a country has reached the sustainability target of saving more children’s lives. The sustainability goals state that all deaths among children must be prevented, if possible. And the child mortality rate in India can still decrease. In Denmark, for example, four children out of every 1,000 live births do not reach their fifth birthday, so there is still room for improvement in India. Does not lead to overpopulation Some may think that overpopulation can end, when more children survive in a country where over a billion people already live. But that doesn’t seem to be a problem in the long term. As more children in India survive, Indian women are also having fewer and fewer children. In the 1960s, each Indian woman had an average of 5.9 children and the population rose rapidly. But since then the Indian families have become smaller and smaller. In 1990 each woman had an average of 4 children, in 2010 the number was 2.6 and today each Indian woman has only 2.2 children on average. It is an important number because it is exactly around the number of children that will keep the population stable in the long term, so the number of people in the country neither rises nor falls.
ttn-70
India is saving the lives of more newborns and toddlers
