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Article History

Received: 25 July 2025

Accepted: 19 February 2026

First Online: 28 February 2026

Declarations

:

: This study is based on secondary analysis of publicly available, de-identified data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai. The NFHS-5 protocol was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of IIPS and ICF International. The survey was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. As this study involved only secondary data analysis, no additional ethical approval was required. As the dataset is anonymised and obtained with informed consent from all participants at the time of data collection, no additional ethical approval or consent was required for this analysis.

: Not applicable. The study is based on publicly available secondary data that do not contain any identifiable information about individual participants.

: The authors declare no competing interests.