Utilization of Reproductive Health Care Services in Uttar Pradesh, India: Multivariate Decomposition of Covariates

Ravendra K. Sharma, Johns Hopkins New Born Health Initiative Research Center

The policy statement on the Reproductive and Child Health programme articulated that couple should be able to have sexual relations free of fear of pregnancy and a safe motherhood. The present paper makes efforts to study the utilization of reproductive health services in economical and demographically backward state, Uttar Pradesh, of India. The decomposition techniques (Martin and Njogu, 1994) is used to study the changes in the odds ratios of reproductive health care (contraception, antenatal care, delivery and postnatal care) utilization during NFHS-I (1992-93) to NFHS-II (1998-99) in terms of compositional changes, changes in propensity of use and inter play of these. The outcome shows that recent increases in these health cares are because of increase in intensity of utilization of these services followed by compositional changes in NFHS-1 & NFHS-2 survey