Critical Analysis of an Intervention to Improve Maternal and Child Health: The Case of Janani Shuraksha Yojana

This paper critically analyzes Janani Shuraksha Yojana (JSY), the intervention to improve maternal and child health. It highlights that there has been a huge difference in the annual percentage growth rate of JSY beneficiaries and Institutional deliveries for each year, which implies that the increasing JSY beneficiaries did not have proportionate increase in institutional delivery. It argues that the achievement of JSY is more on increasing of JSY beneficiaries, rather than the increasing of institutional delivery as a whole. It further argued that the marginal increases of JSY beneficiaries are not from home delivery but from institutional delivery. It proposes a more tangible and sustainable approach to reach the unreached or underserved in the difficult and hard to reach areas, by changing the present strategy of ‘making the unreached or underserved population to reach the health facilities’ to ‘reaching the unreached with health facilities and services at their homestead’, so as to change the home delivery into institutional delivery.