Objective: Infant and under-five mortality is declining In India and many other countries but the level of it is high among scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) population in India. This study intends to quantify the contribution of education in explaining the gap in infant and under-five mortality between SCs/STs and non-SC/ST population in India with a special focus on the effect of education.

Data and method: The four rounds of NFHS data were used. The synthetic cohort approach from Full Birth Histories, logistic regression and Fairlie's decomposition model were used.

Findings: The infant mortality rate (IMR) and under-five mortality rate (U5MR) among children born to illiterate mothers is about 3 times higher than those born to mothers with higher education across all the caste groups. The proportion of secondary and higher educated SC and ST mothers are relatively lower than among non-SC/ST mothers. Regression analysis shows that mother’s education has a statistically significant effect on reducing IM and U5M across all the caste groups. A number of socioeconomic covariates are found associated with IM and U5M; such as father’s education, mother’s age at first birth, birth order, sex of the child, household wealth, exposure to media and socio-economic empowerment of the mother. Decomposition analysis shows that more than 80 percent of the gap in IM and U5M between social groups is explained by the differences in the distribution of parental education and household wealth. Mothers media exposure also significantly contribute to widening the caste gap in infant (15 percent) and under-five mortality (10 percent) risk.

Conclusion: The findings of this study emphasise the need to strengthen on education to disadvantaged girls and health counselling to women, particularly among SC/STs with more focus on backward regions at the lower administrative level, to further reduce IM and U5M in India.