Estimating child mortality through proportion of dead children amongst children ever born to females of a specified marital duration

The estimate of Infant Mortality rate and Child death rate are always required to policy makers of every country’s government for further planning to improve the health status of children and check the validity of present plans. Usually the data for such measures are available from the system of civil registration. However the quality of registered data especially in underdeveloped countries is inadequate both in content and coverage. So we need some indirect techniques to estimate these demographic parameters. The term ‘‘indirect estimation’’, used to qualify some of the techniques in demography, has its origin in the fact that such techniques produce estimates of certain parameters on the basis of information that is only indirectly related to its value. In this paper we have proposed a technique for the estimation of child mortality from observations on proportion of dead children amongst children ever born in a specified group of marital duration of currently married females using the data provided in NFHS-III and NFHS-II .The whole idea is based on regression analysis. The method is simple and the data requirements are also less.