Mother’s Death Shows Bribes Buy India Worst G-20 Maternal Care

Sita Devi was in labor when her family paid the day’s first bribe. The wife of Shivvaran Pal, a subsistence farmer whom she’d married at 15, Sita worked on their land and earned a monthly wage of 1,000 rupees, about $16, cooking school lunches. By 23, she had three daughters under age 3.

She shared a cluster of mud-and-dung huts with her in-laws in the north Indian village of Ukhdand, where Shivvaran tended buffalo and grew vegetables in rocky soil on the edge of the Vindhyachal hills.