India, Sept. 9 -- My first encounter with maternity care was in the sugarcane belt of rural Maharashtra, in the year 2000. I had conducted 18 deliveries at a primary health centre over one year. This was not even a tenth of the childbirths that had occurred at home that year. As was confirmed by the second round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2), childbirth in rural Maharashtra mostly happened at home. Hospitals were sought only when events had already gone wrong. In the past 25 years, with expansion of health care services, government incentives and the growing recognition that medically unsupervised births can become life-threatening, today, more than 90% of births occur in institutions. Over the same period, infant mortalit...