Home / Health / India's NFHS-6: What data was omitted?
India's NFHS-6: What data was omitted?
6 Jun
Summary
- NFHS-6 data on COVID-19 impact was collected but not released.
- Survey questions covered COVID deaths, hospitalizations, and expenses.
- NFHS-6 factsheets omit COVID data, sanitation, and fuel use details.
The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-6, conducted between May 2023 and December 2024, gathered data from over 679,000 households. Seven specific questions focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, probing details on household member infections, deaths, hospitalizations, and associated treatment costs. This data, if released, would offer critical insights into the pandemic's broader health and economic ramifications.
Despite the collection of this COVID-19 related information, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare's recently published factsheets for NFHS-6 do not include these findings. This omission is significant, particularly as official COVID-19 death tolls diverge widely from international estimates. The survey also omitted data on sanitation and household cooking fuel usage, despite these questions being part of the data collection.
Furthermore, NFHS-6 presented fewer parameters than NFHS-5, notably excluding details on neonatal, infant, and under-five mortality rates. Changes were also made to questions regarding HIV/AIDS, anemia awareness, and biomarker testing. Researchers express concern that the exclusion of this collected data limits a comprehensive understanding of public health trends and the pandemic's full impact in India.
