It's one of those indicators that horrifies you every time you look at it, the idea that over 22,000 women in India die as a result of complications from or during childbirth. If there was ever an indicator you'd want to see a big shift in, it would be here, and, thankfully, that is the case. What's also gratifying to see is that these shifts are happening across the country.
Maternal mortality refers to the death of a woman during pregnancy or within 42 days of its end, due to causes related to or aggravated by the pregnancy, excluding accidental or unrelated incidents. The most widely used indicator to understand how risky pregnancy and childbirth are in a region is the maternal mortality ratio (MMR), or the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births.
Maternal mortality in India stood at 398 per 100,000 live births in 1998, and by 2023, this number had decreased to less than a quarter of that figure, with 88 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, my colleague Nileena Suresh finds. Globally, maternal mortality was substantially lower than India's in 2000, but by 2020, India's MMR was less than half that of the world, Nileena finds.
Driving this big shift are many local shifts, led undoubtedly by the southern and western states where the absolute number of maternal deaths is now down to 100-300 in each state. But we're also seeing substantial improvements in some of India's poorest and least developed states, where, too, the MMR has fallen substantially. While the magnitude of improvement in a state like Andhra Pradesh is far greater, the degree of difficulty for a state like Odisha to halve its MMR over 20 years is also monumental.
Allowing us to take stock of these big shifts in mortality, fertility and population growth is a major update that we have made across our Population and Health verticals at Data For India, reflecting newer Indian and international data. Read more about these changes and what they show in our update here.
Rukmini S
