Sometimes, the best way for me to get a sense of a number is through words. If I spell out what the change in that indicator actually means, it changes the weight of what I'm seeing, in a way that numbers sometimes cannot. The big shift in infant mortality is one of those cases.
When I think about the fact that the definition of an infant is a child of up to one year of age, it makes me see data on changes in infant mortality a little differently. Over just the last twenty years alone, the number of children who did not make it to their first birthday has fallen to a third of their 2001 numbers. Over the last thirty years, India has gone from being a country where infants were far less likely to survive to their first birthdays than in the world on average, to becoming safer for infants than the world on average.
The Infant Mortality Rate - the number of infant deaths for every 1,000 live births in the same year - in India has fallen from 83 in 1991 to 26 in 2022, my colleague Nileena Suresh finds in this piece she wrote for us on infant mortality. IMR has fallen in both rural and urban India, Nileena finds, even though it remains higher in rural than urban India. It has also fallen across Indian states, though here too gaps remain.
There is undoubtedly more that we can do. We can, first of all, aspire higher - Nileena finds that after having higher IMR than India for decades, Bangladesh now has a lower IMR. We could also identify the pockets of inequality that have resulted in a higher burden on some groups.
But as a big shift, there it is in words - the odds of an infant in India making it to their first birthday have grown significantly, and there are few things that seem more right than an infant simply getting to grow up to be a kid.
