Gujarat's Chiranjeevi Yojana - a difficult assessment in retrospect

The Chiranjeevi Yojana programme in Gujarat, India, promotes institutional childbirth among poor and tribal women. The retrospective evaluation of the programme, by Mohanan et al., has some limitations. The five early implementing districts are socioeconomically and demographically different from the 21 later implementing districts,2 leading to unmeasured confounding. Also, the wide confidence intervals in table 2 are of concern, as they suggest that the sample of births in each district may have been too small to adequately assess variability at the district level. The authors do not report the overall or annual number of births per district. If people assume that there was one birth per surveyed household and that these births were evenly distributed over each of the five years, they would estimate an average of 250 births over five years or 50 births per year, per district. This may explain the wide confidence intervals and large standard deviations reported.