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Abha Gupta, Pushpendra Kumar and Olalemi Adewumi Dorcas

women. The poor households need to be uplifted through the income generating programs and poli-
cies. Knowledge and awareness about the importance of antenatal check-ups need to be disseminated
among the pregnant women, and more work needs to be done to generate their interest towards the
government health programs. The public policies should be targeted and implemented well in de-
prived communities where the concentration of uneducated, poor, and socially vulnerable women is
high. Also, there should be more focus on rural areas which have clearly demonstrated the lower
utilization of full ANC and the presence of poor health conditions. Targeting the health programs to
the deprived sections and regions not only reduces inequalities, but also helps the country to achieve
low maternal mortality rate. Therefore, programs and policymakers should shift their concern from
achieving ‘average’ lower maternal mortality to ‘distribution’ of the schemes among the neediest
groups. The findings of the paper are also relevant in other geographical locations of India such as
Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, and Assam which constitute of a large number of poor
populations living in rural areas and are characterised by low level of health access. Finally, we
recommend that future studies must use the decomposition analysis in the health sector so that poli-
cies and programs can be directed to the root causes of inequalities.

Conflicts of Interest and Funding
No conflict of interest was reported by all authors.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the editor and three anonymous reviewers
for their critical comments and suggestions which have significantly enhanced the quality of this
paper. The authors are also thankful to Prof. S.K. Mohanty from International Institute for Popula-
tion Sciences, Mumbai and Neeraj Varshney from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur for pro-
viding valuable inputs.

Ethics Statement

The analysis done in this paper was performed using secondary data obtained from publicly availa-
ble sources as outlined in the Data and Methods section.

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