Adult mortality in India

Nandita Saikia, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

This study attempts to evaluate the factors affecting adult mortality with special emphasis on life style behaviors such as smoking or chewing tobacco, drinking alcohol etc. using National Family Health survey. Poisson regression has been carried out for establishing said association, as dependent variable death is count event. Life style factors are taken as independent variables along with other predicators such as age, sex, place of residence, standard of living), literacy composition of household, caste, religion, mass media exposure, family type, type of fuel for cooking, region of residence, etc. This analysis has been adjusted for the clustering of death at the family level. Findings suggest that there exists strong positive relationship between life style factors and premature mortality even after controlling other background characteristics of dead person. Further, age, SLI, literacy composition, religion, type of family, region of residence are some other important determinants of adult mortality in India.