This homemade solution, later upscaled to pre-packed oral rehydration salts, proved much cheaper and more effective in rural areas than saline intravenous drips. The third is oral rehydration solution (ORS), a simple electrolyte blend of salt, sugar and clean water that Bangladeshi women were taught to make and administer to children suffering severe dehydration from diarrhoea. Similarly, education makes women more aware of the need for family planning, apart from delaying the age of marriage. Parents are likely to produce fewer children when they are surer about their survival. The same period also recorded a jump in the country’s average life expectancy at birth - from 47.14 to 72.49 years (India: 68.56 years), and in the adult female literacy rate from under 10% to 70%-plus (India: 63%). The success in population control has come alongside a massive fall in infant and under-five years mortality rates, from 147.9 and 221.4 per thousand live births respectively in 1971, to 26.9 and 32.4 in 2017. That figure for India was 53.5% in 2016, up from 35.3% in 1980, but indicating less impressive progress. Defying the so-called “Muslim” stereotype, the proportion of Bangladeshi women aged 15-49 years using contraceptives has increased from a mere 7.7% to 62.4% between 19. That rate had, by 2016, dropped to 2.1, below the 2.33 for India (which actually had a lower rate of 5.52 in 1971). In 1971, Bangladesh’s total fertility rate - the number of children women bear on an average during their lifetime - was 6.94. More impressive is the improvement in social indicators. Also, while Bangladesh’s population has risen 2.5 times to 165 million since 1971, its rice production has soared 3.5 times to over 35 mt, enough to feed its people. But since then, this has declined dramatically to 24.3% in 2016. The country’s poverty headcount ratio was 56.6% even in 1992, falling only gradually to 48.9% by 2000.
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