<p>The paper, developed within a macroeconomic framework, identifies socioeconomic factors linked to the sharp decline in India’s infant mortality rate (IMR) over recent decades. It also investigates the impact of globalization, economic openness, and trade on the IMR trend, which has not been previously studied. It uses an autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach to cointegration, followed by its error correction representation, to analyze the long- and short-term effects of the globalization index, openness, exports, and selected socioeconomic indicators on IMR. The findings indicate that the decline in IMR is related to gender development, educational attainment, and population growth, while gender inequality has a long-term negative effect. The long-term impact of per-capita income is also unfavourable. Additionally, globalization has a positive short-term effect but a negative long-term one. Economic openness and export trade help reduce IMR over time. These results have important implications for socioeconomic policy in India and provide comparisons between India’s IMR trend and those of other emerging and developing economies.</p>