Causes for child mortality

  • Household food insecurity and Illiteracy specially in women. Children in the poorest households are nearly twice as likely to die before the age of five as those from the richest, as well as those whose mothers lack any secondary or higher education.
  • Lower access for girls to effective prevention and treatment health services are likely responsible for the marked gender differences in mortality.
  • Poor access to health services. In 2017, 2.9 million children in India under one year of age had not been vaccinated with the first dose, according to UNICEF.
  • Lack of availability of safe drinking water. within India, large disparities between states on health indicators such as infant mortality show high levels of inequality in access to healthcare and sanitation levels.
  • Early marriages of girls. High rates of anaemia (affecting 50% of pregnant women nationally), low nutrition levels (23% of mothers are underweight) and over-burdened government and private health facilities are part of the challenge in delivering healthy children.
  • Teenage pregnancies resulting in low birth weight of the new-borns.
  • Poor breastfeeding practices
  • Poor complementary feeding practices
  • Ignorance about nutritional needs of infants and young children and repeated infections further aggravate the situation.
  • Number of other factors such as environmental, geographical, agricultural, and cultural including various other factors have contributive effects resulting in malnutrition.
  • In India, the first dose of measles vaccine is given at nine-12 months of age and the second dose is given at 16-24 months of age through the national immunisation programme. But it appears that millions of children in India do not receive measles vaccine through routine immunisation activities.