Ever-Increasing Caesarean Section and Free Delivery Schemes in India: How Much the Households are Still Paying?

Aberrant rise in c-section deliveries and associated cost have raised concern to achieve the development goals. Given this, India has launched various schemes to directly serve the mother and newborn and to protect the households from financial hardship for childbirth. Using nationally representative unit level data, the article aims to explore the extent of c-section delivery in India and to capture the financial burden on the households due to c-section deliveries. It is observed that the c-section delivery has increased substantially in almost all Indian states. Both rural and urban sector of the states have reported alarmingly high c-section rates. Urban-India reports around 35% c-section cases and the figure for rural region is 19%. However, out-of-pocket expenditure has decreased marginally in the public facilities for c-section. Surprisingly, in many states poorest class pays much higher than the other expenditure classes even in the public facilities for c-section. Additionally, in the public sector, a considerable proportion of the households are spending substantially high share of their annual consumption expenditure to purchase medicine and diagnostic tests in the public facilities. Therefore, information asymmetry about the government schemes and related informal expenses needs to be addressed for better outcome. JEL: I14, I15, I18