Health · indicator 42
Neonatal mortality rate
Modi aheadRahul India
19.91
synthetic 2024
Modi India
16.70
actual 2024
Difference
-16%
vs counterfactual
Placebo rank
1/34
p = 0.029
What this measures
Neonatal mortality rate is deaths in the first 28 days of life, per 1,000 live births. A falling number is an improvement.
India stood at 28.20 in 2013, before the two paths separate. By 2024 Modi’s current India had fallen to 16.70, while Rahul’s India — the blend of comparison countries that tracked India before 2014 — reached 19.91.
That leaves Modi’s current India 16% lower than Rahul’s India — better than where comparable economies ended up. Modi’s current India ranks 1/34 against placebo countries (p = 0.029), so the gap is larger than chance usually produces.
Both paths, 1984–2024
Weights fitted on 1984-2013 only; the counterfactual is projected across 2014-2024.
Divergence
Modi India minus Rahul India, in per 1,000 births.
What Rahul’s India is made of
Donor weights, solved on pre-2014 data. 33 countries in the pool; those not listed carry zero weight.
- Ethiopia49.9%
- Bangladesh29.8%
- Cambodia14.1%
- Morocco6.1%
Method & reliability
- Measure
- nmr
- Source type
- Direct measure
- Estimation window
- 1984-2013
- Projection window
- 2014-2024
- Donor pool
- 33 countries
- Pre-2014 fit (RMSPE)
- 0.4% of pre-period mean
- Placebo rank
- 1/34
- Standardised p-value
- 0.029
- BH-adjusted q across tier 1
- 0.193
The q-value applies a Benjamini–Hochberg correction across all 20 indicators with a counterfactual. We report p as the primary figure because each indicator is treated as a separate question rather than one family of hypotheses — but no result on this site survives q ≤ 0.10, and a reader who prefers the family view should read the p-values accordingly.
How this was calculated
Nothing here is chosen by hand. The comparison countries are not picked for being like India — they are whatever mix best reproduces India’s own path before 2014 on this particular measure.
1Describe India before 2014
India's neonatal mortality rate is summarised over 1984-2013 — the value at five evenly spaced years starting 1984, plus three background controls averaged across the whole window: GDP per capita, urbanisation and life expectancy.
2Find the blend that matches it
Each of the 33 comparison countries is described the same way. An optimiser then searches for the weighted mix of them whose pre-2014 path sits closest to India's. Weights cannot be negative and must sum to 100%, so the result is always a real combination of real countries — never an extrapolation.
3Check the match is good enough
The blend misses India's actual pre-2014 path by 0.4% on average. That is close enough to treat the projection as meaningful.
4Project it forward and compare
The weights are frozen and applied to 2014-2024, years the optimiser never saw. That projection is Rahul's India. The difference against what actually happened is the gap shown above.
5Test it against the other countries
The whole procedure is re-run pretending each comparison country was the one treated in 2014. India's break ranks 1/34 against those placebos, giving p = 0.029 — larger than chance would usually produce.
Why Ethiopia?
Ethiopia carries 50% of the weight here — not because it resembles India economically or politically, but because its neonatal mortality rate moved like India’s did between 1984 and 2013. On 19 of the other 27 indicators on this site it carries no weight at all; where it does appear, the largest is services exports at 39%. The blend is re-solved from scratch for every indicator, which is why the same country can dominate one estimate and be absent from the next.
4 of 33 comparison countries carry any weight at all. The rest are assigned zero by the optimiser.
The counterfactual is 'India without the 2014 structural break', estimated from comparator countries. It is not a forecast of any individual's policies. Sources: World Bank WDI API (2026-07-13); IRENA via Our World in Data.