Women experience disadvantage and oppression differentially, based on their status, context and location.

IT was once thought that fertility below a level could not be achieved without changes in the material conditions of the people.

India has the distinction of being the first country in the developing world to initiate a family planning programme-it later came to be called the Family Welfare Programme (FWP)-with a view to bring down the country's fertility level and contain population growth.

We use data from the 1981 and 1991 censuses of India to examine (a) sex ratios among infants aged under 2, (b) child mortality (q5) by sex, and (c) estimated period sex ratios at birth (SRB) calculated by reverse survival methods, to see whether bias against female children pers

NUPTIALITY plays a significant role in determining the level of fertility and growth rate in a population. The experience of several less developed countries where population growth rates have recently lowered has well demonstrated this effect.

In this report, we propose new measures of wanted and unwanted fertility based on actual and wanted parity progression ratios, and we apply these procedures to NFHS data for eight states in India.