Geographical Insights into Diabetes Among Urban and Rural Women in India: Exploring NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 Databases

A disease is an outcome of physiology, environment, and lifestyle. While a disease has medical aspects, it is not less significant to analyze its distribution. Its geographic dimensions identify and determine its spread in space and time. This can help in studying the “real” situation of the disease and in identifying the focal areas, if any, for disease distribution. Besides, a social orientation of analysis is also helpful in further examinations of the disease. In this regard, the rural and the urban landscape can provide distinct arenas for study and comparison. Diabetes as a metabolic disorder requires no special introduction due to its ever-discussed prevalence in the current context of the country. The present study is an attempt to visualize the geographic dimensions of the “very high” category of diabetes in rural and urban women in India through the recent NFHS-5 database (2019–2021) and a comparative study from the NFHS-4 database (2015–2016). Results indicate that the “very high” prevalence of the disease is higher in urban India and there exists a high degree of correlation in both databases for the administrative divisions of the country. States of South India exhibited the maximum disease prevalence in NFHS-5. In many states, there were marked differences between the rural and urban trends of diabetes. Further, at the all-India level, there has been around 2.5 times augmentation in the disease for the time period from NFHS-4 to NFHS-5 for both rural and urban regions.