Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) in India – Reasons & Responses

The J.K Lone Hospital in Kota, Rajasthan is seeing an increasing number of deaths of infants. Amid the outrage caused by the infants' death, disturbing figures of similar deaths emerged from Jodhpur and Bikaner as well as Rajkot and Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Reports indicate that the cause for these increasing infant deaths is the poor quality of infrastructure in public hospitals. The low-quality public healthcare has a huge impact on the nation’s Infant mortality rate – the indicator of the quality of a country’s healthcare system.

What is the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR)?

• Infant Mortality Rate is the number of babies below one year dying out of every 1,000 born alive for a given time and a given region.
• It is