India can take legitimate pride that it was one of the earliest nations to introduce a population policy, yet fertility control remains a most contentious problem of electoral politics of India in the 1990s.

Although India started its official family planning program way back in 1951, a formal statement on population policy was issued by the Congress Government in 1976 when India passing through Internal Emergency.

Policy decisions taken out of fear result in folly. The author introduces the paper with a plea for critical reflection about the population problem.

Recent studies examining British attitudes and ideologies which structured colonial policies towards 'outcaste'2 and 'deviant' groups in indigenous society, have suggested that the groups who were marginalised included those whose activities were conceived of as 'threatening' to new normative def

The statement, tucked away in one of the many thick Agrawal Samaj magazines I had been perusing, made me smile.

About one quarter of India's population comprises girl children up to the age of 19 years. Today's girl is tomorrow's mother. However, she is discriminated socially, psychologically, economically and in violation of the law.

The status of women in many parts of rural India is low. The situation is even worse among tribal communities or primitive societies, which constitute approximately 7.5 percent of the total population of the country [1]. In such