by PAMELA PHILIPOSE
“We never had anything like the Republic we are going to have now…” – That was Dr Rajendra Prasad, as he put the motion for the adoption of India’s new Constitution to vote in the Constituent Assembly two months before India became a republic in November 1949.
Imagine for a minute that shambolic entity called the Republic of India at that moment, with its 361 million people and innumerable needs, demands and expectations. Not all of these people received the Republic’s attention.
As fresh evidence emerges of India’s unconscionably high rates of maternal mortality (MMR) and infant mortality (IMR) – UNICEF’s ‘State of the World’s Children 2009’ has just put India’s MMR at 450 per 100,000 live births and its IMR at 57 per 1,000 live births – it points to the lack of support accorded to the nation’s young mothers.
Who were these women anyway? According to Census data, women numbered around 175 million in 1951. They had a life expectancy below the national average of 40 years. By age 16, they were more likely than not to have been married, and they would have given birth, on an average, to six children in the course of their lifetimes. The poet A.K. Ramanujam may well have been describing one of them when he once wrote, “I see my mother run back/from the rain to the crying cradles…”
It is not as if the leaders and planners of the Republic did not have the right perspectives or the necessary empathy. As early as 1946, the Health Survey and Development Committee of the Government of India had noted that morbidity in Indian women was the result of malnutrition, frequent pregnancies and anemia. In 1955, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in his foreword to ‘Social Welfare in India – The Planning Commission’, observed: “…Welfare must be the common property of everyone in India and not the monopoly of the privileged groups as it is today. If I may be allowed to lay greater stress on some, they would be the welfare of children, the status of women and the welfare of the tribal and hilly people in our country.” The Planning Commission’s ‘Plans and Prospects for Social Welfare in India, 1951-1961’ laid down in the narrative for the First Five Year Plan that “Women are considered to be handicapped by social customs and social values and therefore social welfare services have specially endeavored to rehabilitate them.”
With such telling observations and with such excellent intentions, why did the country lose the plot on maternal mortality? How did things go so wrong that, today, India does worse than the much-poorer Bangladesh in terms of its under-five mortality rate? That one in 71 of India’s women die of maternity related factors, compared to China’s one in 1,300?
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via Women’s Feature Service