The gift of life often arrives in the quietest gestures. Recently, singer Jankee Parekh, wife of actor Nakuul Mehta, made headlines by donating 90 packets of her stored breast milk to a human milk bank dedicated to supporting vulnerable infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
In a deeply emotional social media post detailing her first “donation journey,” Parekh shared how parting with the milk she had meticulously pumped and stored for months moved her to tears, reflecting on how incredible it is that women’s bodies can create vital nourishment not just for their own children, but for others in dire need.
While high-profile gestures like Parekh’s bring much-needed public visibility to human milk donation, they also shine a spotlight on a critical, structural deficit in India’s healthcare system: the profound shortage of public human milk banks. For millions of premature and critically ill infants born across the country every year, pasteurized donor human milk (DHM) is not a lifestyle luxury, it is a critical, life-saving medical necessity.
The Immense Demand vs. Supply Deficit
India bears the heaviest burden of newborn vulnerability globally, creating a massive, unfulfilled requirement for donor breast milk. According to a report published by Express Healthcare, Dr. Anitha Haribalakrishna, Head of Neonatology at Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital in Mumbai, India highlighted the scale of this crisis. Dr. Haribalakrishna noted that India records approximately 3.5 million premature births every year, accounting for nearly 13% of all deliveries nationwide.
To safely fulfill the nutritional and medical needs of these highly fragile infants, Dr. Haribalakrishna notes that India requires approximately 1,300 fully equipped, functional milk banks.
Currently, only about 100 operational human milk banks exist across India. This leaves a staggering gap in public health infrastructure, meaning hundreds of thousands of low-birth-weight infants lack access to safe human milk during their most critical window of survival.
Why Formula is a Danger to Premature Infants
When a mother is unable to lactate immediately due to postpartum complications, extreme exhaustion, or illness, the alternative is often infant formula or animal milk. For a healthy, full-term baby, formula is a viable alternative; however, for a preterm baby weighing under 1.5 kilograms, it can be life-threatening.
Medical guidelines emphasize that feeding bovine (cow) milk-derived formulas to premature babies heavily increases their risk of developing Sepsis and Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC), a severe illness where tissue in the inner wall of the small or large intestine becomes inflamed and dies.
To eliminate this risk, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF state that when a mother’s own breast milk is unavailable, pasteurized donor human milk is the gold standard alternative. It provides essential bioactive immune components, protective antibodies, and hormones that an underdeveloped infant digestive tract requires to survive and thrive.
How the Milk Bank System Works
A specialized human milk bank; officially designated as a Comprehensive Lactation Management Centre (CLMC) by the Indian government is a highly sterile, technologically intensive environment. Speaking to The Indian Express, Dr. Geet Gunjana Khaitan, Head of the Department of Pediatrics at GMERS MCH Gandhinagar, outlines that the process begins with strict screening. Lactating mothers who volunteer to donate are thoroughly screened for infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C.
Once cleared, mothers express their milk using sterilized pumps into medical-grade, BPA-free containers. The collected milk is then pasteurized, warmed precisely to a minimum of 62.5°C for 30 minutes to eradicate any potential viral or bacterial pathogens while preserving the milk’s crucial immune properties.
Following pasteurization, samples are sent to a microbiology lab for strict culture testing; only batches confirmed entirely free of contamination are sealed and preserved in deep-freezers at -20°C, ready to be distributed to premature babies in the NICU.
Socio-Cultural Barriers and the Urban-Rural Divide
Expanding India’s network of milk banks requires overcoming deeply entrenched socio-cultural anxieties alongside economic limitations. A situational analysis of Rajasthan’s state-supported “Aanchal” Mother Milk Banks, published in PubMed Central (PMC), identified that many communities harbor unfounded fears regarding the “transfer of hereditary traits” through donor milk, alongside religious and cultural misconceptions about mixing milk from different biological families.
Furthermore, the study noted a persistent deficit in recurring public funds, dedicated lactation counselors, and technical personnel required to run these facilities.
Compounding this problem is a severe lack of awareness that strictly follows an urban-rural divide. A peer-reviewed cross-sectional medical study focusing on 420 lactating mothers at the Shri BM Patil Medical College Hospital and Research Centre in the Vijayapura district of Karnataka, published in the medical journal Cureus and hosted on PubMed Central (PMC), revealed a stark statistical gap. Urban mothers in the region possessed a significantly higher awareness level regarding breast milk donation at 20%, compared to just 11.4% among rural mothers.
This drastically limits the pool of voluntary donors in peripheral and rural regions, where infant mortality rates are often at their highest and local government hospitals are working to establish regional milk banks to save vulnerable newborns.
Scalable Innovations
To bridge this profound infrastructural divide, a few regional healthcare ecosystems are demonstrating how innovation can scale up infant survival. In states like Gujarat, public medical institutions have built a thriving donor ecosystem. A report by The Indian Express revealed the extensive impact of Gujarat’s thriving public-sector human milk ecosystem.
Over the span of 18 years, nearly 49,000 women across various socio-economic demographics have voluntarily contributed more than 14,900 liters of human milk, successfully sustaining the lives of over 37,000 premature newborns.
To expand past hospital boundaries, public health divisions are now testing mobile human milk collection vans that travel directly to the doorsteps of nursing mothers who wish to donate but lack the transportation to reach a metropolitan tertiary care hospital.
Ultimately, moving from 100 to the required 1,300 human milk banks will demand a coordinated national strategy. This includes dedicated central budgetary allocations, integrating milk donation awareness into routine prenatal healthcare visits, and setting up strict, standardized national legislation for donor human milk banking.
Until donor milk is treated with the same infrastructural urgency as blood banking, expanding these centers remains one of India’s most critical frontiers in reducing neonatal mortality.
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