India’s tech boom not reflected in child mortality

Living in a comfortable Western country and being constantly immersed in new technology can give you a pretty skewed view of the world – so it’s good to remind yourself sometimes of the privileges we enjoy.

A report. from Save the Children this week makes for sobering reading. Indian tech companies may have benefited from the country’s meteoric rise to become one of the key IT outsourcing destinations for US and Europe but the benefits have yet to reach many of the country’s poor.

Out of the ten countries with the highest number of children dying in 2006, India had the highest number of child deaths per year – nearly two million - and accounts for 25 percent of the world’s newborn deaths, according to the report, Saving Children’s Lives, Why Equity Matters.

India has made some improvements however. The country’s GNI (Gross National Income) per capita increased by over 81 percent from US$450 in 2000 to US$450 in 2006 while child mortality dropped from 94 per 1000 births to 76 per 1000.

However , in the same period, Bangladesh saw a much smaller 23 percent increase in GNI but its child mortality rate dropped from 92 to 69 percent – showing that it is much more effective at fighting child poverty according to Save the Children.