Child Survival and Health Index for India

While India aims to achieve developed status by 2047, it compares poorly on various child survival and health indicators with notable regional disparity across the country. Although it sets targets to reduce neonatal and under-5 mortality rates, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, no proper monitoring system is available to assess the overall and regional performance effectively. This paper addresses this gap by constructing a composite child survival and health index to evaluate the performance in India, as well as its regions in 2015-16 and 2019-20. Results show that India improved from low to good performing status from 2015-16 to 2019-20, though it has to bridge a significant lag to achieve the best-performing status. Out of 35 regions, 5 are classified as best-performing, 25 as good-performing, and 5 as low-performing. The low and good performing regions, with poorer child nutrition indicators, require targeted interventions. The validity test confirms that the index strongly correlates with the Borda ranking based on three related indices, suggesting that the methodology used to construct the index is effective for monitoring progress across regions as future data becomes available. The constructed index and these findings will be informative for policymakers and international agencies in devising strategies to improve child health outcomes.