Determining child drowning mortality in the Sundarbans, India: applying the community knowledge approach

Abstract

Drowning is a major cause of death among children in the Sundarbans, particularly those aged 1 to 4 years. Interventions keeping children in safe spaces away from water are urgently required. The results illustrate how routine data collection systems grossly underestimate drowning deaths, emphasising the importance of community-based surveys in capturing these deaths in rural low- and middle-income country contexts. The community knowledge approach provides a low-resource, validated methodology for this purpose.