At an age when children bubble with the sheer joy of being alive, there are millions of small girls struggling to survive the burdens of poverty, overwork and ill-health in India.

Patharia, a village-situated in the Bundhelkund region is stark contrast to other villages. Inhabited by the Bedia tribe, a part of the vimukta jati where adult members in the family never worked and depended solely on the earnings of the young girl involved in prostitution.

The stark white room is echoing with dreams. "I want to become a doctor... I am engineer... I want to become a nun... (this evokes a riot of laughter) I want to become a dress designer... My dream is to become a social worker ....

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

Sterilization is the most popular method of contraception in India. The 1992-93 National Family Health Survey found that of the 36.2 percent of eligible couples using any modern method, most (30.7 percent) had been sterilized and only 5.5 percent were using temporary methods (IIPS 1995).

In 1952 the Indian government adopted a population policy establishing a national family planning program, which it has constantly pursued, modified, and expanded.

Sterilization for men and women is the most commonly used contraceptive method both in India at large and in Uttar Pradesh.

In recent years there has been a growing concern in many countries, including India, that public health and family planning programs have placed insufficient emphasis on the quality of their services (Ickis 1992; Khan et al. 1994; Mensch 1993; Miller et al. 1991).

A confidential system of enquiry into maternal mortality, based on that used in England and Wales, was introduced in Malaysia in 1991 with a view to identifying deficiencies in care and recommending remedial measures.

Analysis of three years of data from a malaria clinic operated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in the Government Medical College Hospital in Jabalpur, central India, showed a high malaria prevalence among pregnant women, which was statistically highly significant (P <0.0001) c