Do private hospitals in India perform an unnecessary number of C-section operations in order to make more money? It’s a common worry among Indian families, but until recently there was no official data to back up their concerns.
Then data journalists working at How India Lives, a three-year-old startup whose mission is to make public data more easily accessible, stumbled across a database India’s central health ministry had been maintaining. The story here at https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/maternal_perinatal_health/cs-statement/en/ wasn’t looking at C-sections specifically; it was tracking pregnant women and newborns for a study on how to reduce infant and maternal mortality rates. But when How India Lives journalists dug into the dataset, they found that the numbers supported what many Indians had considered common knowledge: the number of C-sections conducted at private hospitals was almost three times as high as the number conducted at government-run, public facilities.