Assam has the highest maternal mortality rate in India, a country that, overall, accounted for some 50,000 of the 289,000 maternal deaths worldwide in 2013. From 2011 to 2013, 167 Indian women died for every 100,000 live births. In Assam the figure was nearly double that at 300. Yet many of these deaths could have been prevented, but for lack of resources. Even as India’s economy expands, the World Bank estimates that from 2010 to 2013, the country spent less on public health as a proportion of GDP than poorer nations like Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Nepal.
The consequences were clear to photographer Lynsey Addario when she arrived in Assam in April with an Indian human-rights nonprofit backed by the U.S. charity Every Mother Counts.