Annual Health Survey (AHS), India, 2007-2012

The Annual Health Survey (AHS), conducted by the Government of India between July 2010 and May 2013, investigates maternal and child health in nine states: Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh. These states constitute about 70 percent of neonatal deaths in India and about one-in-five neonatal deaths globally. The AHS consists of a three-round panel that interviewed over 4 million households in each round, as well as a one-time Clinical, Anthropometric, and Bio-Chemical Survey (CAB). The data were originally released to the public in 2015 as a set of 45 .csv files. The .csv files are included in a restricted-use zipped package as part of the ICPSR release (see dataset 21).

The survey focused on topics such as household composition, caste, fertility, family planning, pre- and post-natal care, breastfeeding, infant mortality, illness, disease, disability, and health care practices. Demographic information includes sex, age, education, occupation, marital status, household size, and religion. The CAB files contain biometric data including but not limited to height, weight, blood pressure, hemoglobin, pulse, and blood glucose.

Potential data users should note that the public-use and restricted-use versions of the datasets are the same except for the masking of day component variables for certain dates in the public-use versions of the files (please see the Description of Variables section for full details). Therefore, only researchers with a limited set of research questions that require full birth, marriage, and death dates will need to apply for the restricted-use versions of the data files.

Additionally, because the final data files are very large and potentially very time consuming to analyze on personal computers, researchers have the option to download ten-percent samples of each file (see datasets 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, and 20). These samples contain the same variables as the original files but only ten percent of the records. The samples were determined by taking a randomly selected ten percent of households in each district. P.I. codebooks were not produced for these samples. Please note that the ten-percent samples for each dataset were selected independently, so it is not advised to merge across datasets within the AHS using these samples, as the match rates will be very low.