Under a comprehensive health data management project, three field testing sites have been developed in a period of two years:

  1. Urban (Behrampura and Vasna),
  2. Rural (Bavla block, Ahmedabad District) and
  3. Tribal (Bhiloda, Meghraj and Modasa of Aravalli district).

Approximately 2.5 lakh individuals were surveyed, for information related to socio-economic status, obstetric history, complication during and after pregnancy, health of new-born child, immunization and anthropometry of children under 5 years of age. This authenticated and current database has potential to play a key role in designing targeted interventions with outcome measurement, which can then develop into successful models to scale up.

While more analysis is being done, a few findings are provided below:

Variations across three regions:

  • Demographics and socio-economical characteristics varies across all three regions.
  • Urban and Tribal population has comparatively smaller proportion of young population as compared to the Rural population.
  • Average family size was recorded: Tribal region (4.5), followed by Urban (3.7) and Rural region (3.3).

Maternal Health

  • 16% of the eligible women out of total women surveyed, were currently pregnant. It was highest in rural followed by tribal and urban region.
  • In urban region, only 1 previous pregnancy was prevalent, which resembles typical urban nuclear families while, in rural and tribal region, mothers who had 2 previous pregnancies were higher compared to urban region, nearly by 30%.
  • More than 70% of the delivery were natural deliveries in all three regions.
  • Proportion of caesarean section deliveries was highest in urban (26%), followed by rural (14%) and then tribal (9%) region. This may indicate the level maternal healthcare facilities in corresponding region.
  • Proportion of severely anaemic women were found to be negligible, however, prevalence for moderately anaemic women were found high in both pregnant and non-pregnant women.
  • For currently pregnant women, Proportion of moderately women were reported highest in tribal region, followed by rural and urban.
  • While for non-pregnant women, proportion of moderately anaemic mothers were considerably high in all three regions. Urban – 61%, Rural – 69% and Tribal – 87%.
  • Height and weight variations among pregnant women:

Child health

  • Total 6177 children of under 5 years of age were surveyed.
  • In all three region, proportion of male child is higher than female except in the case of trial region.
  • There is huge differences in breastfeeding practice across regions. Surprisingly, in urban region out of the total surveyed children only 35% were breastfed within an hour of birth. In the rural sample, almost 85% of the children were breastfed within an hour of birth.
  • About early starting of weaning diet, more than 70% of the children were given water before 6 months in rural region, while the same remain around 25% for urban and tribal region.
  • Immunization of children appears to be done effectively in all regions.
  • more than 90% of the children were immunized with BCG, Polio and Pentavalent vaccine. For measles and vitamin A the vaccination seems to have less coverage hovering around 70%.

Below is the visual representation of variation in the height and weight of currently pregnant and non-pregnant women.

Height

Weight

Reasons for not giving vaccination:

More 40% surveyed population was found to be underweight. The results were again consistent with the malnutrition scenario, where proportion of underweight boys were higher than girls.

Almost 60% of the children were stunted; i.e., low height for age.