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Although life expectancy has improved remarkably with wide availability of curative medicines, health (besides education) is still a highly neglected sector in the development process of India. Particularly neglected area of health is the provision of maternal and child health care services. The neglect covers the areas of infrastructure and skills development and quality of care. Consequently, levels of health care services utililization for mothers and children are among the lowest even by the standards of developing world, although there are vast amounts of regional inequalities where some states are comparable with best performing Asian nations and others with those of poorest performing nations in Asia and Africa. Apart from such pronounced regional variation, there is a great deal of inequalities by socio-economic status as well; such inequalities also varied across the regions. With this basic background this book aims at to highlight the regional and socio-economic differences in the levels of maternal health care services coverage in comparison to child health care services (immunization) coverage in India.

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