Author(s): Pazhani Murugesan

Abstract: Accurate knowledge of adult mortality levels and trends in the developing world is hampered by widespread lack of complete vital registration system. It has been observed that very little research work has been carried out to study the levels, trends and differentials in adult mortality in India, in spite of the fact that health and survival of adult are crucial for wellbeing of house. In this paper, adult mortality level is summarized by the probability of dying between the ages of 15 and 60, or (45q15) in a standard life table notation using the Sample Registration System (SRS) abridged life table for the recent period (ie. for 2006-10). This has been done particularly for Madhya Pradesh and its 45 districts as well as for Kerala and India as a whole. The range of values is wide, from minimum of 77 per 1000 females to a maximum of 265 per 1000 for males in Andhra Pradesh, followed by Karnataka (252). Females have lower probability of dying in all the 16 major states, though the differences are small in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Punjab. We also tried to compute survivorship probabilities from age 20 to age n=25, 30, 60 from the widowhood data of census and these probabilities are converted to estimate expectation of life at age 20 (e020) using South Asian Model Life Table for selected Indian states, Madhya Pradesh and 45 districts of Madhya Pradesh. Mortality derived from data on women of age 45-49 (and also 50-54) appear to be better than those based on other age groups, but these too underestimate adult mortality in comparison to the SRS estimate. It was found from the widowhood method, the expectation of life at age 20 (i.e. e020 (m)) obtained from young mothers were much higher than those obtained from old widows. Widowhood estimates of e020 from all age groups were higher than the official SRS estimate of e020, which indicates considerably high rates of widow remarriage and of that information about the survival status of their first husband were missing. While comparing the adult mortality trends between 1980 and 1990, e020 showed consistent increasing until 1980 and after that the estimate showed declining. It was also noted that except for a few states such as Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, the differences in e020 (m) between widowhood and SRS is even less than one year. District level analysis of Madhya Pradesh shows that there is a differences of five years (Maxi-Mini= 52.8-47.5) of life expectancy at age 20. The same value of all over Madhya Pradesh is 50.6 taking September 1989 as the reference date. Thus this leads to the conclusions that the mortality level of Madhya Pradesh is not equally distributed among districts. The Pearson Ian correlation coefficient was found to be negative (-0.115).

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