Legal reforms have been at the centre of the agenda for strategizing gender justice in India. This has been so, right from the time of nine-teenth century social reforms movements, through the period of nationalist struggles, down to the contemporary women's movement.

With the increase in the urbanization and industrialization, the concept of family in India, which once was to create and maintain a common culture among the members of the family, is undergoing changes.

In 1978, the Bangladesh family planning program launched a national program of outreach services that continues to the present. Young married women were hired and trained to visit women in their homes, offer contraceptive services, provide information, and support sustained use over time.

Inter-spouse communication, though not a new dimension of fertility and family planning research, has remained much less explored in the Indian context than any other correlate of contraceptive use and current fertility.

High family size desire and low acceptance of family planning constitute, the two main factors underlying the high fertility of the Indian population. Excessive loss of children in early childhood in rural areas is considered to be contributory to both of the above factors.

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