The sex ratio in Assam is now skewed in favour of women, the National Family Health Survey for the 2019-20 fiscal (NFHS-5) has revealed.
On the flip side, more women were found to have been married before attaining adulthood compared to those surveyed during NFHS-4 covering the 2015-16 fiscal.
A multinational agency had done the NFHS-5 fieldwork for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare conducted from June 17 to December 21, 2019. Information was gathered from 30,119 households, 34,979 women, and 4,973 men, a Ministry official said.
The data showed Assam mostly ticked the right boxes with improvement in neonatal and infant mortality rates, birth and death registrations, maternity care, delivery care and child vaccination, access to electricity, sanitation, drinking water and clean fuel for cooking. The State recorded a jump in insurance coverage and children attending schools too.
According to NFHS-5, Assam saw 1,012 women born during 2019-2020 per 1,000 men. The sex ratio in 2015-16 was 993 women per a thousand men.
But compared to the last survey, more women and men were found to have tied the knot before reaching the permissible age.
About 31.8% of the women who were surveyed said they married before they turned 18. The percentage of such women in 2015-16 was 30.8.
Likewise, compared to 15% during the last survey, 21.8% of the men surveyed this time had married before they attained the age of 21 years.
The total fertility rate, however, dipped from 2.2 children per woman in NFHS-4 to 1.9 in the latest survey.
Sterilisation of women also dropped from 9.5% to 9% between the two surveys while sterilisation of men remained constant at 0.1%.
Weaker children
The survey found more children aged 6-59 months were anaemic or with low haemoglobin count than five years ago. There were 68.4% such children in 2019-2020 compared to 35.7% during 2015-16.
The percentage of overweight, underweight, and severely wasted and wasted (weight-for-height much below WHO standard) children also jumped significantly while that of stunted children decreased marginally from 36.4% to 35.3%. Stunting is low height for age.
Anaemia was also found to have increased among pregnant and non-pregnant women in the 19-49 age group, and men in the 15-19 and 19-49 age groups.