Health and Regional Disparity in India: Where do we stand?

Despite improvements in access to health care, India has substantial geographical inequalities in health outcomes eg, life expectancy is 56 years in Madhya Pradesh and 74 years in Kerala; this difference of 18 years is higher than the provincial differences in life expectancy in China, or the interstate differences in the USA. The present study tries: to study the extent of regional inequalities in performance of health outcomes, to study the trend in regional disparity and to understand gap between millennium development goals and performance of regions. In order to meet above mentioned objective, 3 rounds of National Family Health Surveys were analyzed for India. States were classified in 6 regions as per NFHS-report classification. The result suggests that performance of health outcome is not same across regions. The health outcomes found to be good in Sothern region, followed by Western region and lowest in East and Central region. The trend analysis shows that the gap between good performing regions to poor performing region is narrowing over the year except the performance in institutional delivery. Even though health outcomes shows positive trend across the region, still achievement of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) remains as a challenge including southern region.