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Mukesh Ranjan, Laxmi Kant Dwivedi, Rahul Mishra, et al.

an urgent need to educate tribal mothers and health personnel, especially in early newborn care. Ap-
propriate behavior change communication (BCC) strategies should be developed for tribal women
and their family members. Some mission-based programs such as Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY)
should be promoted in the remotest corner of the country. Successful programs such as an interven-
tion program by Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH) in
the remote tribal areas of Gadchiroli (Maharashtra) should be replicated extensively in other tribal
areas (Goswami, 2003).
As the millennium development goals (MDGs) have been upgraded to the era of sustainable de-
velopment goals (SDGs) agenda (UNDP, 2016), the Government of India needs to re-frame policies
and pool more efforts to reduce the infant mortality rates in tribes and regional inequity across
the country to avoid the delayed achievement of SDGs.

5. Conclusions

Although much literature has analyzed the predictors of child survival among the tribal population
and non-tribal population, it is less frequent to simultaneously look into factors associated with in-
fant mortality in both tribal and non-tribal populations. Based on the data of the District Level
Household Survey-III in 2007–2008, the present paper examined differentials in factors associated
with infant mortality risks between tribes and non-tribes. We found that sex of infants, breastfeeding
with colostrum, and age of mother at birth were significant factors associated with infant mortality
in both tribal and non-tribal populations. However, state of residence, wealth, religion, place of resi-
dence, mother’s education, and birth order seemed to have different associations with infant mortal-
ity between tribal and non-tribal population. Such differential associations likely resulted from the
differences in cultural traditions, socioeconomic development, and availability of health care servic-
es between these two populations. These results could have implications for intervention programs
that aim to reduce the infant mortality rate in India.

Conflicts of Interest and Funding

No conflict of interest is reported by all authors.
Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editor, two referees and a senior referee of the journal for their construc-
tive comments which helped improve the quality of our manuscript. We have benefitted from pres-
rd
entation at 3 Asian Population Association Conference, July 27–30, 2015, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
We are also grateful to the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, for ease of
access to the data. This organization bears no responsibility for the analysis or interpretations that are
presented in this paper.
Author Contributions

Laxmi Kant Dwivedi and Mukesh Ranjan conceived and designed the research paper; Mukesh Ran-
jan, Laxmi Kant Dwivedi and Brajesh analysed the data; Mukesh Ranjan, Laxmi Kant Dwivedi and
Brajesh contributed agents/materials/analysis tools; Mukesh Ranjan, Rahul Mishra, Laxmi Kant
Dwivedi wrote the manuscript. Rahul Mishra, Laxmi Kant Dwivedi and Brajesh refined the manu-
script.
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.

International Journal of Population Studies | 2016, Volume 2, Issue 2 39