Britain has announced a donation of £252 million (Rs 2.22 billion) for an initiative designed to save the lives of one million children and mothers in India.
Announcing the grant, Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn said, "The birth of a child ought to be a joyful experience, but for more than 100,000 women in India giving birth means death for them and possibly their baby as well. Every year more than two million Indian children will die before they reach their fifth birthday."
He said, "The tragedy is that these deaths can so easily be prevented if mothers going into labour had the support of a skilled midwife, and children were properly immunized against killers such as measles and tetanus."
The funds will be spent over five years in support of the second phase of India's nationwide Reproductive and Child Health Programme. They will be utilized for providing better maternity facilities, essential drugs, more midwives and other equipment and will target the poorest section of the Indian society, particularly in UP, Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.
The United Kingdom is keen to support the Indian government's single biggest response to prevent needless deaths that destroy families across the country, he said.
The programme will introduce new measures to tackle concerns about procurement irregularities in the first phase of the Reproductive and Child Health Programme that was not funded by DFID.
An action plan will help strengthen competitive tendering procedures and increase transparency for the purchase of drugs and equipment, and new standards will be introduced to improve the quality of products. Until these measures take effect, all procurement contracts over $200,000 (Rs 9 million) will be handled by international agents.
A DFID statement said across the world, 530,000 mothers die each year while giving birth. One in five of these deaths are in India. More than 10 million children die before the age of five every year, and one in four of all these deaths occur in India, with 1.2 million infants dying within a month of their birth.
The UN's millennium Development Goals, which include measures to reduce extreme poverty and improve the health of the world's poorest people by 2015, will not be met unless these appalling statistics could be reversed.
The overall aim of the Reproductive and Child Health programme is to reduce significantly India's maternal mortality rate from 407 per 100,000 live births in 1998 to 100 per 100,000 in 2015, and to cut the mortality rate of Under-5's from 70 to 30 per 1000 live births over the same period.
DFID has worked with India in the design of the comprehensive Reproductive and Child Health programme, which aims to provide good quality reproductive healthcare services for the poor and disadvantaged regardless of their income.