Measuring progress

NFHS data should guide policy

The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has released the disaggregated microdata from the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey, or NFHS-5, which was conducted over two years starting in 2019. This is the first release of the NFHS since the fourth round, conducted in 2015-16, and provides considerable information about the direction of several indicators of broader welfare in India. The big headline number was already generally known: That India’s total fertility rate, or TFR — the number of children a woman of childbearing age is expected to have — has dipped below the “replacement rate”