Caesarean sections in Mumbai

One of the things that is tracked really well by municipal corporations in India is birth data. A number of other things are captured along with birth information – religion, education and occupation of parents, age of mother at marriage and when giving birth, method of birth as well as the weight of baby at birth.

When our kid was born, I remember filling this form and was thinking that some great analysis is possible if one can get hold of this data. And it’s now possible thanks to RTI and online data availability with implementation of good IT systems.

Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM / BMC) runs SAP and when working, you can download a number of things in data lookup under the citizen services tab.  I found an option to  download birth registration data when I was looking to get birth certificate for my son.

One of the things I always wondered about was the incidence of Caesarean births in Mumbai. Anecdotally, I knew that it was as high as 30% in private hospitals in Mumbai.  Once I realised that download of this data was possible, I decided to dig a little deep.

Unfortunately, MCGM’s birth registration report link is unreliable (page doesn’t load always), slow (takes time to query and load) and painful (you can’t copy easily) to download data from. Today, I finally managed to download birth data for G/N ward from 1st September to 19th December and compare it with data from news reports (1,2) for the city of Mumbai obtained under RTI.

Broadly, you can see how the percentage of Caesarean deliveries in private hospitals is growing and how much more this proportion is in private versus government hospitals.

Now, that I have the full data for 2,737 deliveries of G/N ward, some more analysis will follow soon.