The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) is a large-scale, multi-round survey conducted in a representative sample of households throughout India. The survey provides state and national information for India on fertility, infant and child mortality, the practice of family planning, maternal and child health, reproductive health, nutrition, anaemia, utilization and quality of health and family planning services.
The National Family Health Survey 2019-21 (NFHS-5), provides information on population, health, and nutrition for India, each state/union territory (UT), and for 707 districts as on March 31st 2017. The NFHS-1 was conducted in 1992-93, NFHS-2 in 1998-99 in all 26 states of India; NFHS-3 was carried out in 2005-2006, NFHS-4 in 2014-2015.
All five NFHS surveys have been conducted under the stewardship of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India. MoHFW designated the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, as the nodal agency for all the rounds of NFHS.
The report of the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) revealed that the total fertility rate (TFR) of Nagaland for ages between 15-49 years has declined from 2.74 in NFHS-4 to 1.72.
The Total Fertility Rate, which is measured as the average number of children per woman, was also reported to have come down from 2.2 to 2.0 at the national level between NFHS-4 and 5 indicating the significant progress of population control measures.
The NFHS-5 survey work was conducted in around 6.37 lakh sample households from 707 districts (as on March, 2017) of the country from 28 States and 8 Union Territories, covering 7,24,115 women and 1,01,839 men to provide disaggregated estimates up to district level.
The survey found that only five states in India that are above the replacement level of fertility of 2.1 are Bihar (2.98), Meghalaya (2.91), Uttar Pradesh (2.35), and Jharkhand (2.26) Manipur (2.17).
The Overall Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) was also found to have increased substantially from 54 per cent to 67 per cent in the country.
Institutional births increased substantially from 79 per cent to 89 per cent in India with Nagaland witnessing a 10% increase while the vaccination coverage among the children recorded 57%.
Nagaland also secured a 99 per cent in SDG indicators indicating that the extent to which married women usually participate in their household decisions about health care for themselves; making major household purchases; visiting their family or relatives is very high.
Uses of Tobacco exceeds 48%
The percentage of men aged 15 years and above who use any kind of tobacco exceeds 40% in most parts of North Eastern states. For Nagaland, the NFHS-5 recorded that 48.4% men population aged 15 and over uses tobacco while 13.7% was recorded for women. The use of alcohol by population aged 15 and over both men and women were recorded 23.9% and 0.9% respectively.
Nagaland record highest use of Insecticide Treated Mosquito Net (ITN)
An important strategy in the control of malaria and kala-azar is prevention through use of mosquito nets to protect themselves from mosquito bites. The proportion of households having at least one ITN for every two persons who slept in the household last night was recorded to be highest in Nagaland (43%) followed by Arunachal Pradesh (35%), and Mizoram (26%).
The survey reported that more than one-third of households (36%) in India have at least one mosquito net, while 8 percent have at least one Insecticide Treated Mosquito Net (ITN).
Sanitation and Household status in Nagaland
There was also a substantial increase in the proportion of households using improved sanitation facilities, which could be attributed to the Swachh Bharat Mission program. The survey recorded that 87.7% of the households had improved sanitation facilities while 99.7% of households in Nagaland were reported to have access to a toilet facility.
NFHS-5 also mentions an increase in usage of clean cooking fuel although 56.5% of the households in Nagaland still use solid fuel for cooking while 54.8% of the household has someone in the house that smokes. The recorded percentage of households living in a pucca house was 33.5% while households with electricity were 98.6%.