Effectiveness of Government Schemes & Digital Healthcare for Progressive Maternal Care in West Bengal: A Systematic Review

Abstract:

Like all developing countries, India is also facing high maternal mortality rate. To reduce this rate of

mortality Indian Government implemented different types of schemes from time to time . Among those

schemes few are funding schemes which provide cash incentives to pregnant woman. In this paper we

are going to discuss two such schemes namely Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), and Pradhan Mantri Matra

Vandana Yojana (PMMVY). In JSY, some amount of cash is provided to mother if the delivery was taken

place in government hospital. It has been seen that this scheme seems to be very beneficial reducing 77%

reduction in rate of maternal mortality while world’s average is only 43%. In PMMVY, a cash incentive of

` 5000 is directly given to the mother. On the other hand new technological development in heath-care is

also emerging like IoT, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, genomics, telemedicine etc., which is being

used as e-Health and m-Healh i.e., Digital health. So, in this paper we are going to study effectiveness of

JSY and PMMVY in maternal health care and also will analyse the role of digital health in that. For doing

the study we have used secondary data by using different types of quantitative data collection methods.

We conducted study in all the 23 districts of West Bengal. The data is being taken from all the round of

sample registration system to understand the pattern of maternal mortality in India. After that we have used

all four National Family Health Survey [1998-99, 2005-06, 2015-16, 2020-21] to analyze the data. We

have also used different electronic search sources like Google scholar, pub medicine etc., to analyze our

data. The scheme seems to be very beneficial in increasing institutional birth and antenatal and postnatal

visit as 20.5 %, 3.8%, and 6% growth respectively. But JSY able to cover only 26% of cost of maternal

care in urban area and near about 16% in rural area so increases some out of pocket expenses for mother.

Rate of maternal and child mortality decreases gradually that could be result of those schemes along with

growing technologies in healthcare. The combination of JSY and PMMVY substantially helps mother in

needful expenses. As a result of that mortality rate decreases and more awareness about maternal health

rights and entitlement of quality of care.