South India #1: Healthcare
In a recent blog , I had mentioned infant mortality rate (IMR) as a good proxy for the quality of life in a country. But, as Nilakantan RS says in South vs North : “Describing India with one metric is as accurate as describing the planet with one metric.” Which is why in his chapter on health, he uses several other metrics to compare the southern states with the rest of India. Life expectancy is not one of them. Why not? Because it is a lagging metric, i.e., it takes a very long time for any improvement to show up (a person has to die for it to show up in the data!). Nilakantan uses IMR (Infant Mortality Rate), U5MR (Under 5 Mortality Rate), and MMR (Maternal Mortality Rate). On all of these parameters, the south does far better than the north. It speaks about the kind of governance over time: “(The strategies to improve these metrics) call for time, effort, long-term commitment and budgetary support from state governments.” A lot of child and mother deaths are prev