Every year 18 Lac, 25 thousand infants die in India, where two third of the infants are aged below 1 month. The major causes of these deaths are diarrhea, pneumonia and other fatal diseases including lack of nutritious diet.

Globally, every one out of three infants who died in the world is from India. An international organization introduced a goal called MDG (Millennium Development Goal 1991-2015). According to that, the infant death rate in India should be 26/1000. However, currently it is 42/1000 which is too high.

In developed nations, this status is 5/1000 and even less than that. Whereas, in Rajasthan the death rate is 48/1000 which is worrisome figure.

To bring down the death rate, Mother’s milk plays a very vital role because it prevents the child from serious illness.

With the slogan of ‘Mother’s Milk – Right of every child’, Udaipur’s Maa Bhagwati Vikas Sansthan founded the first Divya Mother’s Milk Bank in April 2013 at Pannadhay Rajkiya Mahila Chikitsalaya. This year, 514 mothers donated 3603 units of milk in 1248 process. This noble contribution saved 312 infants admitted in NICU.

Going forward with this mission, a special program ‘A mother’s help or baby health’ was introduced for those mothers who are unable to feed milk to their own child due to physical issues like loop in breast, blood flow or infection in breast.

Divya Milk Bank offer free service to such mothers by safely extracting milk through a special process and feeding it to the child. Till now 1028 mothers have received aid since 2013.

Divya Mother’s Milk Bank appealed through all social service organization, media and common people to support their campaign to save child from malnutrition and encourage breast feeding to lower the infant death rate.

The information provided in this article is by Amit Sethia, coordinator of Maa Bhagwati Vikas Sansthan