New Delhi, Union health ministry sources said the indicators claimed to be "missing" in the National Family Health Survey -6 Fact Sheets are being monitored through dedicated national surveys and administrative databases, and therefore were not duplicated in the preliminary release.
Official sources emphasised that the factsheets represent only the first stage of dissemination and cover 101 major indicators intended to provide a concise snapshot of India's most critical health and demographic trends.
The detailed national report will provide a much broader picture, they said, and will be released subsequently with a much wider range of indicators, detailed analyses and methodological documentation.
Several indicators cited as "missing" from the factsheets are already being monitored through dedicated national systems, including sanitation and clean cooking fuel coverage, mortality, birth registration and population characteristics.
On the absence of anaemia estimates in the factsheets, they explained that haemoglobin testing was not undertaken in NFHS-6 due to concerns surrounding the capillary blood sampling methodology used in previous rounds.
Instead, anaemia prevalence estimates will be derived from the Indian Council of Medical Research's Diet and Biomarkers Survey, which employs gold-standard venous blood sampling methods to improve accuracy and reliability.
NFHS-6 has introduced several new indicators into the factsheets, including population composition, elderly population share, financial inclusion, antenatal care utilisation, vaccination coverage, severe diarrhoeal disease prevalence and expanded breastfeeding indicators.
