India is the first country in the world to have an official programme for family planning that commenced in 1952. It has also seen a strong women’s movement to assert reproductive and contraceptive rights. This book brings to the fore several contestations and negotiations between public policy and the women’s movement in India. The comprehensive volume puts together key documents from archival records and authoritative sources, and traces the contours that have marked and defined the population policy in India as well as rights issues for women. A major intervention in the field, this book will be indispensable for scholars and researchers in public policy, public health, demography, gender studies, social policy, development studies, sociology, social justice, human rights, politics and those interested in the study of modern India.

This book is the first systematic study on the historiography of the family planning communication process in India. It traces the history of the development of a highly technical health communication process. It discusses how the discourse on India’s population problem was at the heart of the development dialogue which was being promoted by the British colonial administration. The book examines the role of the censuses and the Five-Year plans in the development of the discussion on the population ‘explosion’ in India. Also, it critically discusses the role of the Ford Foundation’s leadership in institutionalising the communication process in India. The book essentially argues that population control communication enabled the ideas of a homogenised nation, an ‘ideal’ Indian woman and an ‘ideal’ Indian family. This, in turn, led to the obliteration of cultural, ethnic, geographical and economic specificities of India as a country. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of public policy, media and communication studies, Indian politics, modern Indian history and South Asian Studies.

Birth controlled analyses the world of selective reproduction – the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future – through a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of ‘controlling’ birth: contraception, reproductive violence and repro-genetic technologies. It argues that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies like those that assist conception or allow genetic selection may appear to be an antithesis of other violent versions of population control, this book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. All population control policies target and vilify women (Black women in particular), and coerce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance; Birth controlled argues that assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies employ a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class and caste. To empirically and historically ground the analysis, the book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations, South Africa and India, examining interactions between the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets and their influence on the technologies and politics of selective reproduction. The book provides a critical, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly ‘post-population control’ era. The contributions draw on a breadth of disciplines ranging from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics and science and technology studies to theology, public health and epidemiology, facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.

Education, Equality and Development: Persistent Paradoxes in India Women's History

Changing the Terms of the Discourse: Gender, Equality and the Indian State recognizes the need to archive women's voices, roles and contributions in a largely male dominated national history. The volume not only documents but also analyses the evolution of ideas and strategies and the concrete measures that were taken to shape policies and programmes for women’s equality in India.

The most exhaustive reference work available on this critical subject in world history, focusing on the politics, economy, culture, and society of both colonizers and colonized. "The history of the last 500 years is the history of imperialism," writes editor Melvin Page. In the Americas, as a result of imperialist conquest, disease, famine, and war nearly wiped out a population estimated in the tens of millions. Africa was devastated by the slave trade, an integral part of imperialism from the 1400s to the 1800s. In Asia, even though native populations survived, native political institutions were destroyed. Imperialism also forged the two most important ideologies of the last five centuries—racialism and modern nationalism. In more than 600 essays presented in this three-volume encyclopedia, Page and other leading scholars—historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists—analyze the origins of imperialism, the many forms it took, and its impact worldwide. They also explore imperialism's bitter legacy: the gross inequities of global wealth and power that divide the former conquerors—primarily Europe, the United States, and Japan—from the people they conquered.