This chart caught my eye recently and I was like - wow - things like these can actually go the other way round too?
What explains this deterioration?
First of all, amongst the developed nations, US already has the worst maternal mortality rate (for example in 2020, it was nearly 3x that of the next highest rate, France). One of the reasons it is probably getting worse is because US has been closing down birthing units since 2018 (300 closed since then).
Anyway, this reminded me of the work being done by Dr. Aquinas to reduce the maternal / infant mortality rates in tribal regions of Odisha, India.
I had created the above film on her work few years ago.
Watch it for just 30 seconds and you will realize how bad it is in tribal India.
Couple of months ago, Dr. Aquinas reached out to me to get an updated film made. The CoreVoice team is on it (the shooting is already over). The impact has only increased with time!
So how do these numbers look like for India?
Before I answer that, here are three books that are a great read if you want to understand the different social and cultural aspects of India, backed by solid data.
Whole numbers and half truths - Rukmini S
South vs North - Nilakantan RS
What millennials want - Vivan Marwaha
So we saw that in US, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) has almost doubled from about 17 mothers dying during delivery (per 1 lakh) in 2018 - to ~33 in 2021.
That figure for India is around 100 deaths per 1 lakh delivering mothers (so basically 3 times worse than US). And that’s after improvement over the years.
But it looks crazily different for different states:
Best state in India - with lowest MMR - Kerala - 42 (still worse than the 33 that US saw)
States where MMR is between 50 to 100 - Tamil Nadu, AP, Telangana, Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Karnataka, West Bengal
100-200: Bihar, MP, Chattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Punjab
Worst states - highest MMR (more than 200) - Assam & UP
Moving on to the other two things…
Thing 1
India has its own Mr. Beast
If you don’t know who Mr. Beast is, well - just skip this thing.
But since we are on the India vs USA kind of theme today, did you know about the Indian dude who is featured in the article? I certainly didn’t till a month or two back - when I read it.
Thing 2
The tech to translate our thoughts to text now exists!
A study was published in Nature Neuroscience in May this year. It showed that a model trained on functional MRI scans of three volunteers was able to predict whole sentences they were hearing just by looking at their brain activity. And it was surprisingly accurate.
Here are more details if you are as fascinated with this development, as I am.
On this topic, want to share that just few months ago, I’d finished an audibook called ‘The Battle for your Brain’ by Nita Farahany. I don’t rememeber much of what I heard (my common issue with listening vs reading) - but I think the author had indeed spoken about a world where all this “thought-data” could get easily available / accessible to corporates and govt (and how to deal with that - both from citizen awareness POV and regualtory aspect front). Crazy times ahead!
Cool. So now you know about the MMR scene in the US (along with some insights on India) + 2 more things. May you get to do more of what brings you joy and less of all things that suck it away. See you soon.