MORTALITY IN INDIA: LEVELS, TRENDS AND PATTERNS

Abstract

Recent advances in the craft of demographic estimation from defective data, and improvements in data base because of the development of the Sample Registration System and the conduct of several sample surveys, call for a reassessment of levels and trends in vital rates in India. As the reappraisal must necessarily be based on the age distribution of the population recorded in Indian censuses, we first check the sensitivity of intercensal estimation procedures to errors in reported age distributions. We conclude from this examination that most procedures tend to understate the level of adult mortality because age misstatements cause significant net transfer of persons of lower age intervals to higher age intervals. Therefore, some modifications are proposed to 'variable-r' procedures to reduce their sensitivity to systematic forms of age misreporting. These new procedures are applied to Indian national and state-level data. For the national-level, mortality estimates are presented for a century beginning with the decade 1881-91. For 15 major states estimates are made for periods since 1951-61. We also briefly discuss estimates of the crude birth rate that were obtained as by-product of applying the procedures. Our estimates indicate that both mortality and fertility in India have declined in recent years more rapidly than is commonly believed. According to our estimates, life expectancy at birth increased by about 14 years between 1951-61 and 1971-81. During the same period the crude birth rate is estimated to have fallen by 20 percent. Among the states, Karnataka shows the fastest reduction of mortality during this interval in which life expectancy at birth increased annually by a year. The slowest reduction of mortality was observed in Orissa where the increase in life expectancy at birth was less than 5 years during the 20-year period. The study also sheds some new light on the sex-specific trends in mortality, and on age patterns of the decline. The study also employs an economic framework to analyze the regional variation in infant mortality. One of the conclusions emerging from this analysis is that maternal education has significant aggregate-level effects on infant mortality that operates through a community's access to health services.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.