Morbidity in India since 1944

Abstract

Surveys in countries at all stages of development have founded their work on health-status and morbidity, on self-reported health status by individual members of households who feel sick. Doubts have been raised related to cross-population comparisons on the objectivity of a person's judgement of his/her health. Amartya Sen (Objectivity and position, University of Kansas, Department of Philosophy, Kansas, 1992, Philos Public Affair 126–145, 1993) has written on the philosophy of objectivity and, in Sen (Br Med J 324:860, 2002), compared morbidity data across Indian States, and countries like the United States. His discussion helps formulating and testing a null hypothesis that an Individual's self-reported health-status (SRH) and morbidity (SRM) do not depend on his/her socio-economic status (SES) as well the socio-economic environment in which he/she lives. The test rejects the null hypothesis in favour of an alternative that there is a positive association between the two using data from the 71st Round (January–June 2014) survey of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). This means that lower the SES, the lower will be the health-status (reported as having higher morbidity); the higher the SES, higher will be the health-status (reported as having low morbidity). We also explore a linear probability model with constraints on the error term for ensuring that the estimated probabilities lie within the closed unit interval [0, 1].