An indirect technique for estimations of infant and child mortality: Data analysis from India and Bangladesh

Abstract

The analysis of mortality data is of vital interest to policy planners and health administrators in the formulation of development strategies to meet the health needs and demands of people and also in the implementation and evaluation of public health programmes. The study of child mortality provides useful information on the current demographic situation in that region and indicates on the prospects of potential change in future. Death is a vital event recorded through the system of civil registration. But in developing countries, quality of registered data is not very much reliable because of its failure to reach to all groups of the population affected by illiteracy and ignorance. Because of many unreliable estimates arising out of the civil registration system, exploration of indirect techniques for estimating vital indicators has become a necessity. In the present study, we have utilized an indirect technique for estimating infant mortality and under-five mortality rates by using the data of mean number of children ever born and living to currently married women aged 15-49 years. The method is essentially based on the technique of regression line analysis taking infant mortality rate or under five-mortality rate as a dependent variable and the proportion of dead children among the total children born to currently married females (15-49 years) as independent variable. The regression line analysis was computed and tested using data from National Family Health Survey (India) and Demographic and Health Survey (Bangladesh). The observed and expected rates computed from regression line were found overlapping in most cases showing complete adequacy of the proposed indirect method.