The mandate of the Committee was massive, to assess the status of women in India in all aspects of their lives, keeping in mind the diversities (class, caste, religion, ethnicity, region, abilities, age groups etc.), complexities and paradoxes that prevail in our society.

This paper analyses, from the perspective of women's human rights, an unsuccessful attempt to amend the abortion law in the Penal Code of Sri Lanka in 1995.

The theoretical framework of this paper takes into an account the relationship between women’s work in subsistence agriculture and the rural development strategies, both at the local and national levels.

It is by now almost an axiom with demographers, labour economists and economic historians th

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Narayani