On a hot summer’s day in 1982, while walking through a jungle path in Bankura, West Bengal, anthropologist Naraya

It was in Deorala village in Rajasthan on September 3, 1987 that the last incident of sati was reported. Then an 18-year-old Roop Kanwar had committed sati by jumping into the funeral pyre of her 23-year-old Rajput husband, Maal Singh.

It is important to understand the social, physical, and administrative environment in which the grassroots components of a health program function and provide services.

It is unfortunate that a measure of confusion has set in about the precise nature and ramifications regarding the immolation - whether self, sati, or otherwise of the 55-yearold Charan Shah on the funeral pyre of her husband at Satpura in Uttar Pradesh on November 11.

The self-immolation by Charan Shah on the funeral pyre of her husband in a remote hamlet in Mahoba district in Uttar Pradesh has elicited a spate of articles dealing with the practice of Sati. Of these, a number of articles by Ms.

One of the purposes of family planning programmes in developing countries is to provide for the unmet needs of couples for contraception.

Undernourished women tend to deliver low birth weight babies (Karmer, 1987) and to have pregnancy complications (Baird, 1947). Perinatal mortality and prematurity rates were found to be high among short statured women (Barros, 1987).

Contraception as a behavioral phenomenon has been the focus of many population researches, during the last half a century. In fact, explaining contraceptive behavior is a complex theoretical effort. Learning, motivation,