An analysis of the NITI Aayog’s ‘Healthy States, Progressive India’ report released on June 25 shows that the usage of estimated figures in place of reported numbers, to calculate certain health indicators, has adversely impacted the final index score of certain States while boosting that of others.
Skewed result
The report had used an estimated number of births and deliveries to calculate two key health outcome indicators — “full immunisation coverage” and “proportion of institutional deliveries” — which carried high weightage in the calculation of the final index score. The use of estimated numbers instead of the reported figures resulted in a skew.
For instance, in the case of Tamil Nadu, which had secured a composite index score of 63.38 for the base year 2015-16, using reported number of deliveries and births instead of estimated figures would have resulted in an increase of 2.17 points for that year.
On the other hand, using reported numbers would have resulted in a decrease of 2.99 points and 3.34 points from the final index scores of Gujarat and West Bengal.
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