Seventy-two per cent of Indian women who give birth at home said they find health care facility unnecessary while 26 per cent said it was too expensive.
NEW DELHI: Seventy-two per cent of Indian women who give birth at home said they find health care facility unnecessary while 26 per cent said it was too expensive, a government survey has found.
But the preference for institutional deliveries grow if a woman comes from an affluent family and is educated.
The National Family Health Survey -3 (NFHS-3) showed that women who belong to affluent families (58.5 per cent) want to give birth to their child in a private hospital instead of government institutions.
The good news, however, is that almost 40 per cent of births took place in health care facilities, up from 26 per cent when the first NFHS survey was conducted in 1992-93 and 34 per cent in 1998-99 (NFHS-2).
"Home births are still the norm, however, seventy-two per cent of women who gave birth at home said going to a health care facility is unnecessary and 26 per cent said it is too expensive," the survey, whose final report was released recently, said.
Also, 11 per cent women said that the health facility was located too far away or that transport was not available to reach the facility.
More than half of deliveries take place in the women's own home and nine per cent take place in the parent's home.
The survey said "since about one-third of women and men gave reasons dealing with the cost of services and problems of accessibility, utilisation of health facilities for deliveries could also be increased by lowering direct and indirect costs and making services more accessible."
The NFHS-3 survey also said that 62.7 per cent of women who are educated prefer giving birth to their child in institutions.
It said births in health facilities are about equally divided between those that take place in a private health facility and those that take place in public institutions.
"Two-thirds of deliveries in urban areas and 29 per cent of deliveries in rural areas take place in health facilities," it said.
The proportion of births occurring in a health facility is higher for mothers under 20 years of age and age 20-34 years (38-40 per cent) than for mothers age 35-49 (22 per cent).
It found that only 18 per cent of births to scheduled tribe mothers are delivered in health facilities, compared with 51 per cent of births to mothers who do not belong to a scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, and other backward class.
The survey also said that while Jain mothers (93 per cent of them) prefer a health care facility to give birth, in the case of Buddhist mothers, 59 per cent of them go for institutional deliveries.
In the case of Sikh mothers, 58 per cent of them deliver their child in institutions, but among Muslim mothers it is 33 per cent.
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