More than 400,000 Indian babies die every year from preventable causes within 24 hours of their birth, despite the country’s recent rapid economic development, a report said yesterday.
India accounts for a fifth of all newborn deaths worldwide, said the major report published by charity Save the Children to launch a global campaign to reduce infant mortality.
Government initiatives in India to provide basic health care to all have not changed the grim reality for the nation’s babies, said Thomas Chandy, head of Save the Children in India.
PHOTO: AFP
“Although the schemes are there and the intention and allocation of resources is there, in many places they are not reaching out to people,” he said. “Every child, no matter where or to whom they are born, has an equal right and deserves an equal chance to survive. And every one of us has a moral responsibility to act and act now.”
The report, gathered from research in 14 countries, calculated that globally 2 million children die each year within 24 hours of birth — one every 15 seconds.
India’s child mortality statistics are particularly stark, with 72 deaths per 1,000 live births, higher than neighboring countries such as Bangladesh.
And more than 2 million Indian children die each year before their fifth birthday.
Major causes of death in the first years of life include malnutrition, pneumonia and diarrhea — afflictions that are cheap and easy to cure.
“I’ve had four children, but I lost my second child when he was just two days’ old,” Mewa, a 25-year-old mother who has tuberculosis and lives in Ajmer in Rajasthan, told Save the Children. “I don’t know why my son passed away. He wasn’t even ill. I guess if I could know one thing, I’d like to know what treatments there are that I could use for my children. That’s all.”
Low-cost solutions could reduce neonatal mortality by up to 70 percent, but public reluctance to fund increased health costs has stopped the Indian government from taking action, the report’s authors concluded.
“Change is indeed possible. If people understood how affordable and feasible it is to prevent children dying, they’d be shocked,” Chandy said.
India has clocked a decade of rapid economic growth that has allowed it to boost spending on poor and rural communities, but Save the Children said most such programs had not benefited those most in need.
More than half of all Indian women give birth without the help of skilled health care professionals, leading to infections and complications.
In far-flung areas, doctors and hospitals are rare and villagers often put the health of their children in the hands of poorly trained substitutes.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS