National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5)

National Family Health Survey

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Recently, the first-phase data of the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) 2019-20 has been released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

What is NFHS 5?
National Family Health Survey 5 is the recent round of the survey carried on by MoH&FW to bring out reliable data on emerging health and family welfare issues. The coordinating and implementing agencies that are helping the ministry to bring out this NFHS round are:

International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai
A group of survey organizations and Population Research Centres
ICF International is providing technical assistance for the NFHS 5 while the United States Agency for International Development is providing financial assistance.

Seven lakh households are being covered to collect the data. 67 indicators are being used to cover the NFHS 5 data.

Coverage of Survey

The latest data pertains to 17 states — including Maharashtra, Bihar, and West Bengal — and five UTs (including J&K) and, crucially, captures the state of health in these states before the Covid pandemic.
Phase 2 of the survey, which will cover other states such as Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh, was delayed due to the covid and its results are expected to be made available in May 2021.

Coverage :

The NFHS-5 contains detailed information on population, health, and nutrition for India and its States and Union Territories.
This is a globally important data source as it is comparable to the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) Programme of 90 other countries on several key indicators.
It can be used for cross country comparisons and development indices.
NFHS-5 includes some new topics, such as preschool education, disability, access to a toilet facility, death registration, bathing practices during menstruation, and methods and reasons for abortion.
In 2019, for the first time, the NFHS-5 sought details on the percentage of women and men who have ever used the Internet.

The key results from the State/UT factsheets are as follows:

The Total Fertility Rates (TFR) has further declined since NFHS-4 in almost all the Phase-1 States and UTs.
The replacement level of fertility (2.1) has been achieved in 19 out of the 22 States/UTs and only 3 states viz. Manipur (2.2), Meghalaya (2.9), and Bihar (3.0) have TFR above replacement levels now.
Overall Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) has increased substantially in most States/UTs and it is the highest in HP and WB (74%). The use of modern methods of contraception has also increased in almost all States/UTs.

National Family Health Survey Rounds
Totally five rounds of surveys have been conducted to date. The below information gives details on the round and the year it was conducted.

First Round of NFHS conducted in 1992-93
Second Round of NFHS conducted in 1998-99
Third Round of NFHS conducted in 2005-06
Fourth Round of NFHS conducted in 2015-16
Fifth Round of NFHS conducted in 2018-19

Who Published NFHS?

MOHFW has appointed International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai as the Nodal agency. IIPS has collaborated with the following international agencies for the successful conduct of the survey.