The notion of quality in the public health system is becoming increasingly an issue for policymakers and planners in India. The Eighth Five-Year Plan identified the poor quality of family welfare services as one of the factors

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