Seeing a drastic change, where women chose to get their deliveries done at a hospital by paying money, has been able to fetch positive results in regards to the infant mortality rate.

In the first wide-ranging study of the Janani Suraksha Yojana, India’s determined Maternal Health Program, results of which were published in the British medical journal Lancet on Thursday, researchers from the Public Health Foundation of India and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington could find that women, who participated in this cash incentive scheme had 4 fewer stillbirths and casualties in the first week of life for each 1,000 pregnancies and 2 fewer neonatal deaths for each 1,000 live births.

The study said that implementation of JSY in 2007-08 was extremely uneven by state, from no more than 5% to 44% of women giving birth. The poorest and least educated women did not all the time have the uppermost odds of receiving JSY payments.

JSY had a noteworthy effect on increasing antenatal care and in-facility births. In the matching study, JSY payment was linked with a decrease of 3.7 prenatal deaths for each 1,000 pregnancies and 2.3 neonatal deaths for each
1,000 live births.

Additionally, there were 4.1 prenatal death reductions for each 1,000 pregnancies and 2.4 neonatal deaths for each 1,000 live births.