The Status of Maternal Healthcare in India since Independence: A Historical Review

Author(s): Anand Chahal

Abstract:

Maternal healthcare has been one of the most closely observed, and most unevenly realised, parameter of public health policy in India since 1947. This Research article traces the historical trajectory of maternal and child health policy across eight decades, from the community-health vision of the Bhore Committee and the family-planning dominated Five-Year Plan era, through the reproductive and child health reforms of the 1990s, to the National Rural Health Mission and Janani Suraksha Yojana launched in 2005, and the more recent insurance-based model of Ayushman Bharat. It delve on three key indicators - the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR), the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), and the rate of institutional delivery, within this policy history and brings the data up to the most recent nationally representative estimates, drawn from the Sample Registration System and the National Family Health Survey. India's MMR has fallen from an estimated 1,287 per 100,000 live births in 1957 to 88 per 100,000 live births in 2021-23, while institutional delivery has risen from roughly a third of all births in the late 1990s to 88.6 per cent by 2019–21. The article argues that this transformation, though substantial, remains geographically and socially uneven, concentrated in a predictable set of high-burden states, rural districts, and marginalised communities, and closes by situating these gaps within ongoing scholarly debates about the adequacy of a facility-push, incentive-based model of maternal care.

keywords:
Maternal Mortality Ratio, Infant Mortality Rate, Institutional Delivery, National Rural Health Mission, Janani Suraksha Yojana, National Health Committees, Health Policy History, India.

Pages: 24-27     |    13 View     |    5 Download