How India is failing its infants long before they arrive at hospitals

Child death figures were routine for July and August, when infections peak and already overburdened hospitals are unable to cope

 

Soon after the death of 70 infants in a tertiary care hospital in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh (UP), made the headlines last month, similar stories began to pour in from across the country. Ninety children were reported to have died in two months in Rajasthan’s Banswara district hospital; in the month of August alone, 55 children had died in Maharashtra’s Nashik Civil Hospital and 49 in UP’s Farrukhabad District Hospital.

Tragic as these deaths were, they were hardly