Breaking down the question

The question has two distinct demands that must be handled separately. The first asks for the social and cultural determinants of the infant mortality rate (IMR) — the number of deaths of children under one year of age per thousand live births. The word to notice is social and cultural: the examiner is deliberately steering you away from a purely biomedical account of disease and towards the sociological forces that shape which infants survive.

The second demand shifts register — from mortality in general to infanticide in particular, especially female infanticide, and asks for suggestions to prevent it. This is a policy-facing part that expects concrete, sociologically grounded measures rather than a moral lament.

A strong answer keeps the two parts connected by a single thread: the same patriarchal and structural inequalities that raise infant mortality also produce the deliberate killing of unwanted, usually female, infants. IMR is thus not merely a health statistic but, as demographers argue, a sensitive index of a society's overall condition — its poverty, its gender relations and the reach of its public health.

How to approach it

Open by defining IMR and framing it as a social indicator, then organise the determinants under clear sociological heads rather than a loose list. A well-structured response will:

  • Group determinants into gender, poverty and caste, maternal factors, and access to health services.
  • Invoke Amartya Sen's idea of missing women and Barbara Miller's work on the endangered daughter to give theoretical weight to the gender dimension.
  • Treat infanticide as the extreme point on a continuum of neglect, not a separate freak phenomenon.
  • Offer preventive suggestions that combine legal enforcement, economic incentives and cultural change.

For the demographic backdrop, see our notes on the components of population growth.

Model answer

The infant mortality rate is one of the most telling indicators of social development, because the survival of an infant depends less on medicine alone than on the social conditions surrounding its birth. Sociologically, its determinants can be grouped into several interlocking sets.

The first is gender. In much of India a deep-rooted son preference means that daughters receive less breast-feeding, poorer nutrition, delayed medical attention and fewer immunisations than sons. Amartya Sen's celebrated argument about the missing women of Asia, and Barbara Miller's account of the endangered daughter in the northern plains, both demonstrate that female infants die at higher rates not for biological reasons but because of discriminatory care. Gender, in this sense, is literally a matter of life and death in the first year.

The second is poverty and caste. Infants born into poor and socially marginalised households face contaminated water, inadequate sanitation, crowded housing and food insecurity. The clustering of high IMR among Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the landless shows how class and caste hierarchies translate into differential survival. Poverty also forces early return to labour, cutting short the care an infant needs.

The third is maternal condition. The health of the mother is the health of the child. Early marriage, teenage pregnancy, closely spaced births, maternal anaemia and the mother's own lack of education all raise infant deaths. A mother with schooling is more likely to seek antenatal care, immunise her child and recognise danger signs — which is why female literacy is among the strongest predictors of low IMR.

The fourth is access to health services. The availability of institutional delivery, trained birth attendants, immunisation and clean water shapes survival directly. Where the public health system is thin, distant or indifferent, preventable infections claim lives that better-served regions save. Cultural practices around childbirth, feeding taboos and reliance on unqualified practitioners add a further layer.

Female infanticide is the extreme expression of these same forces. Where daughters are seen as an economic burden — through dowry, the loss of labour to the marital home and the cultural premium on sons — the neglect that raises female IMR can harden into the deliberate killing of newborn girls, and, with new technology, into sex-selective abortion before birth.

Prevention must therefore work on several fronts at once. Legally, the strict enforcement of the ban on prenatal sex determination and the punishment of infanticide are necessary, but law alone cannot succeed against a hostile social norm. Economically, incentive schemes that support the girl child, conditional cash transfers and secure old-age support that reduces the dependence on sons attack the material logic of son preference. Socially, raising female literacy, delaying the age of marriage and expanding women's employment change the value attached to daughters. Culturally, sustained campaigns, the involvement of local leaders and health workers, and the visible success of educated women shift attitudes over time.

Ultimately, infanticide will decline only when a daughter is no longer experienced as a liability. Reducing infant mortality and preventing infanticide are thus two aspects of one project: dismantling the structures of gender and poverty that decide, at the very threshold of life, who is allowed to live.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners reward candidates who read the words social and cultural seriously and resist the temptation to write a public-health essay on infections and vaccines. The gender dimension is central; answers that miss son preference and the female disadvantage cannot reach the higher band.

The distinction that lifts a script is treating infanticide as continuous with everyday neglect rather than as an isolated crime — this shows sociological reasoning about a continuum of discrimination. Naming Sen and Miller signals theoretical command, and grounding the suggestions in the economic logic of son preference, rather than offering only moral appeals or bare legal bans, demonstrates policy maturity. Weak answers stop at listing causes of infant death; strong answers explain the social order that distributes survival unequally.