Search

Rising numbers of young unmarried men in India reflect a marriage squeeze that goes beyond the shortage of brides created by sex-selective abortion. We describe a decline in men's marriageability caused by their falling economic prospects at the same time as families of brides are increasingly seeking grooms with stable employment. We group young men into those without jobs or much education, those with education but no work, and the privileged few with education as well as employment. This classification resolves some of the seeming contradictions in the qualitative literature on marriage in India. Some of this literature talks about the rising prevalence of bride price and some about the persistence of dowry, while some papers reflect in general on the costs of being young, male, and aimless. Our commentary includes a review of the growing literature on the physiological and (perhaps) consequently behavioural and health outcomes of men's anomie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using panel data, this study tracks the impact of reproductive transitions on women's status in the household in India. Here, status refers to the social benefits that women experience by meeting societal expectations related to childbearing. The analysis shows that becoming a mother is associated with increased freedom of movement and access to enabling resources. The adoption of permanent contraception—a common life course event marking the end of childbearing in India—is associated with increased freedom of movement but has no association with changes in access to enabling resources. Household decision-making, another dimension of women's status examined in the paper, is less dynamic over time and there is limited evidence of its association with reproductive transitions. The findings illustrate the tight linkages between household power dynamics and the life course in the South Asian context, and highlight the centrality of women's role as mothers in determining their social position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the trend of the birth rate in India between the period 1911 to 1950. The Government of India, in connection with the Census of 1951, has published a report entitled Estimation of Birth and Death Rates in India during 1941-50. In this report the actuaries associated with the census of 1951 have analysed a mass of material and have tried to arrive at firm estimates of the birth and death rates for different regions of India during 1941-50. Economist Kingsley Davis has also tried to compute birth estimates for the major provinces of India during 1926-30. These two publications thus enable you to examine two independently estimated rates of omission in the two decades, i.e. 1926-30 and 1941-50. In the present paper it will be shown that the formula devised for West Bengal is valid for a much larger area, comprising the provinces of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. The rates of omission estimated by the author's formula for 1921-30 will be compared with the corresponding rates of omission for 1926-30 as estimated by Kingsley Davis, and it will be shown that in all the cases the two agree quite closely.

In this paper the behavioural factors which make for continuing high levels of child mortality in rural Punjab, despite favourable conditions in terms of nutrition, income, women's literacy and health care facilities are examined. A major factor is that inadequate attention has been paid to improved health care practices within the home. Women's autonomy, social class, and mothers' education significantly influence child survival. One of the pathways by which mothers' education affects child survival is through improved child care. In this society, a woman's autonomy is Lowest during that part of her life-cycle which also contains her peak childbearing years: this perverse overlap raises child mortality. The risk of dying is distributed very unevenly amongst children, as the majority of child deaths are clustered amongst a small proportion of the families. The death-clustering variable remained significant even after several possible biological and socio-economic reasons for clustering had been controlled. It is argued that this clustering of deaths is partly due to the poor basic abilities of some mothers and other carers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the preceding issue of this journal, a generalized version of the Brass growth balance method was proposed that made it applicable to populations that are not stable and are open to migration. In this companion paper, the results of applying this new procedure to data from India's Sample Registration System for the decades 1971-80 and 1981-90 are discussed. The results at the national level show that, during the decade 1981-90, 5 per cent of the deaths among men, 12 per cent of the deaths among women, and about 7 per cent of births were being missed by the system. Further, it is estimated that the level of under-enumeration in the 1991 Census was more than that of the 1981 Census by 0.7 per cent for males and 1.4 per cent for females. The paper also presents results for major Indian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996 the government of India announced a new national population policy that eliminated numerical targets for new contraceptive acceptors. This paper examines the history of target setting in India and factors that led to the elimination of targets. The analysis is based on published and unpublished reports on India's population policy and the family planning programme and interviews with senior Indian and foreign officials and population specialists. Five factors are identified as playing a role in the evolution from target setting to a target-free policy: (1) the research of India's academics; (2) the work of women's health advocates; (3) the support of officials in the state bureaucracy who approved the target-free approach; (4) the influence of the donors to India's family planning programme, especially the World Bank; and (5) the International Conference on Population and Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dowries in most regions of South Asia have steadily become larger over the last 40 years, causing widespread destitution among families with daughters to be married. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind dowry `inflation' with data on marriage transactions and other individual and household information from six villages in south- central India, and from the Indian census. It is found that a 'marriage squeeze' caused by population growth which resulted in a surplus of younger women in the marriage market, has played an important role in the increase in dowries. Other factors that increase the size of dowries include differences in the land holdings of the parental households, and residence in regions in the more northerly parts of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the matter of rural-urban fertility differentials in India. It is a commonplace that urban fertility is lower than rural fertility in the West, and it is frequently assumed that this holds for non-Western populations as well. In the case of India, previous studies of rural-urban fertility ratios have appeared to bear out this expectation. However, fertility ratios based on the most recent available age distributions show no significant rural-urban fertility differentials. This conclusion is supported by several recent sample surveys of children ever born and is consistent with the generally accepted fact that contraception is negligible even in the cities of India. It is noted that the virtual disappearance of the Indian rural-urban fertility ratio differential over time has in all likelihood resulted from a narrowing of the rural-urban infant and child mortality differential.

This paper presents a new method for estimating the effect of child mortality on the total fertility rate (TFR). The method is based on discrete-time survival models of parity progression that allow construction of a multivariate multidimensional life table of fertility with four dimensions: woman's age, parity, duration in parity, and number of previous child deaths. Additional socio-economic variables are included in the set of predictor variables in the underlying survival models of parity progression. The life table yields a replacement rate, which measures the effect of one additional child death on the TFR. The method is illustrated by applying it to three Indian National Family Health Surveys. Major findings are that dead children are incompletely replaced, and that the replacement rate rises as the TFR falls, reflecting women's increasing ability to control their fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an analysis of micro-data for India that shows a high correlation in infant mortality among siblings. In 13 of 15 states, we identify a causal effect of infant death on the risk of infant death of the subsequent sibling (a scarring effect), after controlling for mother-level heterogeneity. The scarring effects are large, the only other covariate with a similarly large effect being mother's (secondary or higher) education. The two states in which evidence of scarring is weak are Punjab, the richest, and Kerala, the socially most progressive. The size of the scarring effect depends upon the sex of the previous child in three states, in a direction consistent with son-preference. Evidence of scarring implies that policies targeted at reducing infant mortality will have social multiplier effects by helping avoid the death of subsequent siblings. Comparison of other covariate effects across the states offers some interesting new insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little is known about how environmental and pathological threats to human survival and longevity are perceived by the public. In this study in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, which used individual interviews and focus-group discussions to investigate the changing costs of and motivations for reproduction, respondents were questioned about their perceptions of changes in mortality. The findings show that, while child mortality levels are perceived to have fallen dramatically in recent times, the health and survival prospects of the middle aged and the elderly are seen to have been better in the past. The perceived decline in adult health is attributed to environmental deterioration and lifestyle changes accompanying modernization. This paper explores people's reasons for this unexpected worldview. References to pesticides and chemical fertilizers as causes of death abound in their explanations and are seen to be associated with unhealthy agricultural practices and impiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs the trend in the population sex ratio in India between 1971 and 1996 from available information on changes in sex differentials in mortality in the country since the beginning of the century. It is estimated that, although the mortality of females relative to that of males in India has improved since 1968, the population sex ratio increased between 1971 and 1981, stayed constant between 1981 and 1991, and started to decrease only after 1991. This implies that the recorded decrease and increase in the periods 1971-81 and 1981-91 respectively were both spurious and were the results of undercounts of females in 1971 and 1991. Another implication of this finding is that, owing to the lagged effect of past mortality on current trends in the population sex ratio, this ratio is a bad proxy for use in the study of changes in differential mortality by sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates whether past declines in mortality could have created a huge deficit of eligible men in the marriage market, and whether the ensuing competition for mates could be responsible for the coercive character the dowry system of marriage has assumed in India. New indices have been developed to measure the trends in bridegroom availability that aid in the inquiry into the demographic origins of marriage squeeze. It is contended that the marriage squeeze against women was particularly intense in India because mortality decline, in addition to age structural changes, drastically reduced the number of widowers in the population who once accounted for about one-fifth of the annual supply of bridegrooms. Our projections indicate that, as a result of recent declines in fertility, the marriage squeeze against females will ease substantially by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that marriages of men will begin to be delayed more than those of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I comment on the unexpected finding from primary and secondary data that, although the age at effective marriage is significantly lower in North India compared to the southern part of the country, mother's age at first birth is very similar in both regions. That is, the first birth interval is much longer in the North. Standard socio-economic and biological reasons for this difference are found to provide incomplete and unsatisfactory explanations - instead, the longer first birth interval in North India is explained in terms of the marriage and kinship patterns in this area which lead to (i) lower frequency of intercourse and (ii) long periods of abstinence when the wife visits her parental home. Both these factors operate primarily during the first years of marriage and result in a convergence of the ages at first birth in the two regions. The argument, therefore, questions the correctness of policy prescriptions which equate early marriage with an early start of childbearing, and seek to control the latter by changing the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on infant mortality in rural India. The infant mortality rate also fell dramatically from about 240 per thousand births during the 1920s to about 130 during the 1960s. The rate of decline in infant mortality, however, has been slower than that in general mortality. The annual infant mortality rates for the 1970s are based on the Sample Registration System and exclude the states of Bihar and West Bengal. Notwithstanding the fluctuations in the new annual rates, the level of infant mortality during the 1970s appears to have remained constant at around 130 per thousand births. Clearly, children have not benefited to the same extent as adults from the improvements in food supply and from the preventive and curative measures implemented so far. The primary purpose of this paper is to identify these key factors. A secondary object is to develop an analytical framework to understand the determinants of infant mortality from data collected at household and village levels.

In this paper we develop a method for estimating the incidence of widow and widower re-marriages from the current marital status data given in a census or survey. The method basically consists of reversing the procedure of estimating adult mortality from information on widowhood status. The method is applied to the all-India data from the Census of 1971. The principal result is that about one-third of the ever widowed women and slightly fewer than two-thirds of the ever widowed men were currently remarried in 1971. Similar application of the method to earlier censuses, and to state-level data, may provide answers to some of the riddles in Indian sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the economic value of children to parents, focusing on labour contributions, in an agriculturally based village in Western India. In order to evaluate the possible link between economic utility and fertility, demand for labour both within the village and between individual households is examined. The results show low levels of participation by children in family enterprises up to age 17 and underemployment beyond that age, accompanied by an impetus towards out-migration of sons. Contrary to results reported elsewhere, families with greater demand for labour, including poorer households, receive less help from children than do other groups. It is argued that low productivity of labour in the survey area underlies this phenomenon and leads to a strong preference for educating sons. Concomitantly, sensitivity to costs of children is more prevalent among villagers than the belief that children are economically beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The registration of births and deaths in India, even at present, is too inadequate to be of much help in estimating fertility and mortality conditions in the country. From time to time, Indian census actuaries have constructed life tables indirectly by comparing one census age distribution with the preceding one. Because of inaccurate age reporting in Indian censuses, it was essential for those who constructed life tables to smooth the age distributions. The results obtained depended to a large extent on the method chosen for smoothing. This paper is an attempt to estimate some demographic measures for the nine census years between 1881 and 1961 by applying uniform computational methods to the data of all years. The measures, by sex, include an abridged life table, the growth rate, birth rate and death rate and as a by-product of, rather than a prerequisite for, obtaining other measures, the smoothed age distribution. The basic assumption underlying this paper is that, for all practical purposes, the Indian population can be considered as stable or quasi-stable for a period of 100 years in the immediate past.

This paper analyzes the relationships between certain socio-cultural and demographic or family size variables and attitudes toward family planning held by a sample of industrial workers in Ambarnath, a western Indian city. A comparison is made between these findings and those obtained from the nearby village of Badlapur. The major finding is that the variables which predict the presence or absence of favorable attitudes toward family planning in the village male sample are the most important ones in the male industrial sample. In both studies the education was the first ranking variable, followed by number of living sons. Caste, too, was significant in both studies. This evidence seems to indicate that the urban-industrial milieu's effect is almost non-existent in developing this attitude. Favorableness toward birth control seems to be part of a non-traditional value complex chiefly associated with educational attainment, not urban-industrial exposure or effects associated with this environment.

After the abolition of slavery in British colonies in 1834, many thousand labourers left India under indenture for employment on colonial plantations. Their efforts resulted in a striking rise in exports of plantation products. At the end of their indenture, many Indians decided to settle in their new home, especially' in British Guiana, Trinidad, Mauritius and Fiji. The paper discusses the districts in India from which labourers were recruited; the conditions of service under the indenture system, and its advantages and abuses. It discusses the opportunities open to the Indian labourer at the end of his indenture, and the facilities which the government or the planters provided for his settlement on the land. Those who did not settle on the land turned to the professions or trades, often with success. The paper discusses the attitude of the communities of reception" to the Indian during and after indenture, and his adjustment to a multi-racial society. It analyses his change in outlook as a result of emigration, the increase in his ambition and initiative, and his transition from submissiveness to independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the composition of Indian emigration to Fiji is analysed from documentary data. Most emigrants went as indentured labourers from 1879 to 1916. The system of recruitment, the considerable resistances to emigration and pressure stimulating it, places of origin, age, sex, marital status, economic position, religion and caste and expectations of emigrants are considered; 75 % of the emigrants embarked at Calcutta. In the main they were unaccompanied, young men and women, came from the north-eastern United Provinces and were a fair cross section of village castes. The emigrants were driven primarily by economic but also by social pressure and intended to return to India. Emigration from Madras differed in some respects. Other Indian emigration to Fiji, of Puniabis and Gujratis particularly, is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating seasonal variation in health helps us understand interactions between population, environment, and disease. Using information on birth month and year, survival status within the first year of life, and age at death (if applicable) of more than 330,000 children observed in four rounds of India's Demographic and Health Surveys, I estimate period mortality rates between birth and age one (1m0) by calendar month. Relative to spring months, infant mortality is higher in the summer, monsoon, and winter months. If spring mortality conditions had been prevalent throughout the year, mortality below age one would have been lower by 11.4 deaths per 1,000 in the early 1990s and 3.7 deaths per 1,000 in the mid-2010s. Seasonal variation in infant mortality has declined overall but remains higher among disadvantaged children. The results highlight the multiple environmental health threats that Indian infants face and the short time of year when these threats are less salient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mortality change is not usually assigned much importance as a source of population growth when future population trends are discussed. Yet it can make a significant contribution to population momentum. In populations that have experienced mortality change, cohort survivorship will continue varying for some time even if period mortality rates become constant. This continuing change in cohort survivorship can create a significant degree of mortality-induced population change, a process we call the ‘momentum of mortality change’. The momentum of mortality change can be estimated by taking the ratio of e 0 (the period life expectancy at birth) to CAL (the cross-sectional average length of life) for a given year. In industrialized nations, the momentum of mortality change can attenuate the negative effect on population growth of declining fertility or sustained below-replacement fertility. In India, where population momentum has a value of 1.436, the momentum of mortality change is the greatest contributor to its value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper alternative models for testing for child death clustering are explored, using data from Punjab. Significant evidence of clustering is found only amongst the lower socio-economic and educational groups. The majority of these families succeed in avoiding child-loss despite their social and economic disadvantages, while a few experience multiple child loss. As maternal education and socio-economic status rise, the negative deviance in factors related to child mortality appears to be removed. The extent of clustering is quite high in this population, indicating substantial potential for reducing child mortality by focusing services on high-risk households. Family building factors such as short birth intervals and high parity births do not raise child mortality when families are disaggregated by level of risk. They seem to be an effect rather than a cause of clustering of child deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued in this paper that "perceptions" about the determinants of fertility and of fertility decline can be "politicized" by various special interest groups; that is, these perceptions can be used to push for policies and interventions which often have an ambiguous relationship to actual fertility, but are important because they already appear on the political agenda of these groups. Such politicization is facilitated by the near-universal consensus that fertility decline is a legitimate goal in the developing world, by the increasing evidence that there can be no grand theory of fertility decline, and by the willingness of scholars to attach a policy significance to all their findings. Two examples of such politicization in India are presented, one of which has a socially beneficial impact, whilst the other is potentially disruptive, to illustrate that such politicization is not without its dangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population decline of the Parsis of India has been the subject of a number of demographic studies. While descriptive statistical accounts provide some clues about the causes of the decline, they fail to assess systematically the cultural and historical factors that are basic for the decline. This paper identifies the relative roles of low nuptiality, low fertility, emigration, and intermarriage in that decline, and the particular aspects of Parsi cultural values and historical experiences that account for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analysed population data from the 2015–16 National Family Health Survey to disentangle the intricate underlying effects of reproductive behaviours and fertility preferences on child growth. We expected birth interval length to be more strongly associated with stunting than sibsize and these effects to be moderated by whether the child was wanted or unintended (mistimed/unwanted). Regression analyses showed strong and equal effects of short birth interval and sibsize on stunting, when adjusted for potential confounders and unobserved between-mother heterogeneity. There were no statistical associations between stunting and mistiming/unwantedness of index children, suggesting the absence of discrimination against such children. We conclude that while fertility preferences have no effect, reproductive behaviours exert significant influence on child growth. Sibsize has been falling for many years in India but birth interval lengths have remained largely unchanged. The results underscore the need for strengthening uptake of reversible contraceptives to enable longer birth intervals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has documented intergenerational transmission of human capital from children to parents. Less is known, however, about heterogeneity in this 'upward transmission' in low-resource settings. We examine whether co-resident adult children's education is associated with improved health among older parents in India, using nationally representative data from the 2014 Indian National Sample Survey. Parents of children with tertiary education had a lower probability of reporting poor health than parents of children with less than primary education. The benefits of children's education persisted after controlling for economic factors, suggesting that non-pecuniary pathways—such as health knowledge or skills—may play an important role. The association was more pronounced among economically dependent parents and those living in the North and West regions. Taken together, our results point to a strong positive association between children's education and parental health, the role of non-pecuniary pathways, and the importance of subnational heterogeneity in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether there is excess morbidity among daughters of Indian or Chinese immigrants in the US by studying the prevalence of disability among children. We use data from the 2012–14 American Community Surveys on approximately 20,000 US-born children of Indian and Chinese immigrants. Children of US natives are used as a comparison group to account for innate differences in disability between the sexes. Results indicate that there is excess disability among daughters compared with sons among children of Chinese immigrants and children of immigrants from northern or western Indian states; this excess disability declines with younger age at arrival or longer exposure to the host country. Analysis using children of Filipino immigrants as an alternative comparison group yields similar excess disability rates for females. Supplementary material is available for this article at: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines associations between fertility intentions and maternal health behaviours during and after pregnancy among a nationally representative sample of 3,442 women from India. Two waves of data (2005, 2012) from the India Human Development Survey were analyzed to investigate the influence of unwanted births on women's use of antenatal care, timely postnatal care, and the delivery setting using binary and ordered logistic regression, partial proportional odds models, and propensity score weighting. Fifty-eight per cent of sample births were unwanted. Regression results show that, net of maternal and household characteristics, women with unwanted births were less likely to obtain any antenatal care and had fewer antenatal tests performed. Unwantedness was also associated with a lower likelihood of delivering in an institutional setting and of obtaining timely postnatal care. The relationships between unwantedness and antenatal care, postnatal care, and delivery setting were robust to models accounting for propensity weighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Indian National Family Health Surveys (1992–93, 1998–99, 2005–06), this study examined how the relationship between household wealth and child health evolved during a time of significant economic change in India. The main predictor was an innovative measure of household wealth that captures changes in wealth over time. Discrete-time logistic models (with community fixed effects) were used to examine mortality and malnutrition outcomes: infant, child, and under-5 mortality; stunting, wasting, and being underweight. Analysis was conducted at the national, urban/rural, and regional levels, separately for boys and girls. The results indicate that the relationship between household wealth and under-5 mortality weakened over time but this result was dominated by infant mortality. The relationship between wealth and child mortality stayed strong for girls. The relationship between household wealth and malnutrition became stronger over time for boys and particularly for girls, in urban and (especially) rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Data from the Indian National Family Health Survey, 2005–06 were used to explore how pregnancy intention at the time of conception influences a variety of maternal and child health and health care outcomes. Results indicate that mistimed children are more likely than wanted children to be delivered without a skilled attendant present (OR = 1.3), to not receive all recommended vaccinations (OR = 1.4), and to die during the neonatal and postneonatal periods (OR = 1.8 and 2.6, respectively). Unwanted children are more likely than wanted children to not receive all recommended vaccinations (OR = 2.2), to be stunted (OR = 1.3), and to die during the neonatal, postneonatal, and early childhood periods (OR = 2.2, 3.6, and 5.9, respectively). Given the high levels of unintended fertility in India (21 per cent of all births), these are striking findings that underscore the importance of investments in family planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study examines overall and region-specific mortality changes and regional mortality variation in India since the 1970s, using data from the Sample Registration System (SRS). An evaluation of the quality of SRS data confirms their reliability for children and adults under age 60. The results suggest the convergence of mortality across the regions of India with important inter-state differences in the pace of health improvements over time. After spectacular progress during the 1970s and the 1980s, many Indian states have witnessed slower mortality improvements in both young and adult age groups. India faces difficulties in making further reductions in infant mortality and in the burden of chronic and man-made diseases at adult ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greater 'empowerment' of women in India, measured by their education and autonomy, is associated with a reduction in the extent to which their sons' educational attainment exceeds that of their daughters. Improving both father's and mother's education increases the educational attainment of daughters more than that of sons, but raising mother's education is associated with a significantly greater reduction of the difference in attainment between sons and daughters. In families in which the mother has completed primary education, the average difference between boys and girls in years spent in school is almost a third of a year lower than it is where the mother has less education. A one-standard-deviation increase in mother's autonomy is associated with an increase in daughter's schooling of more than half a month but has no correlation with son's education. The findings highlight the importance of women's empowerment for the intergenerational transfer of equality in educational attainment of the sexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use data from the 1931, 1941, and 1951 censuses of India and the 1951 census of Pakistan to examine the demographic consequences of Partition in the Punjab in 1947. Had growth rates for the period 1931-41 for the Punjab as a whole continued to 1951, the population of the Punjab would have been 2.9 million larger than that recorded in 1951. Population losses from migration and mortality above age 20 were approximately 2.7 million greater between 1941 and 1951 than would have been predicted by loss rates between 1931 and 1941. We estimate a net Partition-related population movement out of the combined Punjab of about 400,000. We conclude from several lines of analysis that Partition-related population losses in the Punjab, either from deaths or unrecorded migration, were in the range 2.3-3.2 million. Partition was also marked by a dramatic religious homogenization at the district level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The validity of estimates of unintended childbearing has often been questioned, especially given their almost exclusive reliance on responses to survey questions that ask women to recall their intentions about past pregnancies. An opportunity to compare prospective and retrospective descriptions of intendedness was provided by a follow-up survey in four Indian states in 2002-2003 of rural woman originally interviewed in the 1998-99 National Family Health Survey-2. The results demonstrate a pronounced tendency for births prospectively classified as unwanted to be retrospectively described as having been wanted or mistimed. The main reason seems to be either that mothers adapt to the reality of a new birth or are reluctant to describe an existing child as having initially been unwanted. Our findings suggest that retrospective accounts of the wantedness of a birth, such as those obtained by current Demographic and Health Surveys, may lead to significant underestimates of true levels of unwanted childbearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While women's education continues to be strongly associated with lower fertility in India, an important feature of India's current fertility transition is the spread of contraceptive use among uneducated women. Indeed, changes in their fertility are now making the major contribution to the country's overall fertility decline. We use multilevel statistical procedures to investigate the variation in contraceptive use among uneducated women across India. The analysis suggests that, while many of the expected socio-economic variables play their part, there are also considerable diffusion effects in progress, many of which operate at levels beyond the uneducated women's own individual circumstances. For example, we find significant relationships with others' use of contraception and others' education. Mass media exposure also emerges as an important diffusion channel The multilevel analysis also reveals significant clustering of contraceptive use at different levels, much of which is accounted for by the variables included in the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is a country with a pervasive preference for sons and one of the highest levels of excess child mortality for girls in the world (child mortality for girls exceeds child mortality for boys by 43 per cent). In this article, data from the National Family Health Survey are used to examine the effect of son preference on parity progression and ultimately on child mortality. The demographic effects of family composition are estimated with hazard models. The analysis indicates that son preference fundamentally affects demographic behaviour in India. Family composition affects fertility behaviour in every state examined and son preference is the predominant influence in all but one of these states. The effects of family composition on excess child mortality for girls are more complex, but girls with older sisters are often subject to the highest risk of mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies changes in fertility and women's position in an Indian village. The history of women's position in Indian society is one of both advances and setbacks. It is generally agreed that in recent decades legislation on women's rights has undergone decisive, positive change. Moreover, despite a relatively abundant literature on the status of women in India, empirical studies of the social position of rural women are few, and in none has change over time been investigated. The status of women, especially their education, is thought to play an important role in influencing the number of children they desire, resultant fertility, and the survival of their children. In earlier studies in South Asia the associations between particular indicators of women's status and fertility levels have been examined, but the results related to the role of women's status in bringing about fertility change have been rather inconclusive. Age at marriage has received considerable attention in the literature on women's position, although it is not entirely clear whether it is itself an indicator of status, or a result of other status indicators such as women's education and pre-marital employment.

In a micro-study in rural India the old-age security motive for high fertility among widows, who are generally considered to be a particularly vulnerable group was investigated. Thirty of the 123 village widows, representing different economic situations and living arrangements, were selected for in-depth interviews. Comparisons were made between widows who were primary breadwinners and had dependent sons living with them, widows who lived with earning sons but were not totally dependent on them; and widows who resided with and were economically dependent on their sons, as well as those who lived with their daughters. Economic factors alone did not account for the pervasive son-preference in the community: sons had a deeper cultural significance which persisted even when widows were financially well-off or independent. It is argued that the emphasis given to economic explanations in previous fertility research has masked the importance of cultural factors which still remain largely unexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is informed that in much of the Third World the average age of women at marriage has risen at much the same time as marital fertility has begun to fall, a phenomenon observed in parts of the West during the late nineteenth century. It is further informed that there has been a persistent rise in women's age in Karnataka and India as a whole. Comparing the first quarter of the century with 197!, the mean age of women at marriage in India rose from around 13 to 17 years and in Karnataka from 15 to 18 years. The fastest rise occurred during the 1960s, and this is believed to have persisted, or even accelerated, through the 1970s although no statistics on marital status by age are yet available from the Census of 1981. The later marriage pattern of Karnataka was typical of south India, although in Kerala mean age at marriage was 21 years by 1971, while in its progressive core, Travancore, it was 17.5 years by the beginning of the century. Between the beginning of the century and 1971 the mean age at marriage of men in India had climbed slowly from 20 to 22 years, but in Karnataka had risen hardly at all, perhaps by half a year from 24.3 to 24.8 years. There is some evidence that after 1961 it may have begun to decline slowly. Part of the explanation probably lay in the great age gap between husbands and wives in Karnataka, ten years in 1891, and still, in 1971, at seven years, the largest in India. Karnataka has been characterized more by very early marriage of women than by child marriage. Even during the early decades of the present century, in the overwhelmingly rural district, only one per cent of 5 to 9-year-olds were married, and the numbers have been insignificant since the 1940s.

In this study the relationship between fertility and the economic utility of children is investigated by using survey data gathered in 1975-6 from an agricultural village in Western India. Fertility measures included both attitudinal variables as well as number of children and an index of contraceptive behavior; economic utility was gauged through several measures concerning labor contributions of young children, transfers from older, non-resident children and contributions towards old-age security. The analysis indicates that no obvious association exists between fertility and economic utility. Specifically, variation in the labor contributed by children had no appreciable effect upon villagers' attitudes towards fertility, nor was it connected to actual family size. Old-age security, whether measured by attitudes of younger men or by facts relating to old men, was similarly unrelated to fertility. It is argued that the respondents have become much more aware of the costs of children (especially education) than the benefits, as measured in this study, and hence that the relationship between economic utility of children and fertility has lost the importance it may once have had. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on old age security and the importance of children in providing security in rural areas of India as of November 1980. The study investigates old age security as a possible motivation for high fertility, using information gathered by means of questionnaires and participant observation in an Indian village during 1975-76. Results indicated that such motivation may be quite weak and hence that population policies aimed at lowering the economic value of children through public social security programs would achieve little. A variety of evidence pointed to the importance of economic assets, mainly land, in assuring security in old age rather than an abundance of sons. Moreover, given a low expectation of life the necessity to provide support to the aged was infrequent, a fact which seemed to be appreciated by the surveyed villagers in India. The attitudes expressed by village men indicated the extent of felt need for support in old age and its expected source.

First-year mortality in rural Uttar Pradesh is characterized by a predominance (60 per cent) of deaths during the first month of life, of which 66 per cent are reported to be due to tetanus. This pattern Is not typical of the historical experience of many developed countries and the current experience of some less developed countries where post-neonatal mortality predominates. To examine this phenomenon., two causal models of neonatal mortality (one for tetanus and one for all other diseases) are developed and tested using retrospective survey data from 2000 couples living in rural Uttar Pradesh. Neo-natal tetanus mortality is found to be primarily a function of opportunities for exposure to the disease (e.g. lack of antiseptic birth practices, ownership of large animals) rather than of socioeconomic status or demographic variables. The importance of examining neo-natal mortality by cause, and the shortcomings inherent in making inferences from the historical experiences of Western nations are emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The residence background of wives who migrate to metropolitan areas plays an important role in determining their fertility. From the data collected during 1966, relating to 7,872 currently married women of Greater Bombay, India, an attempt was made to establish differentials in marital fertility by residence background of the wives. This was categorized into three groups, non-migrants, urban migrants and rural migrants. It was observed that rural migrant wives exhibited significantly higher fertility compared with the other two groups, and this was explained by their lower educational attainment. Between the non-migrant and the urban migrant wives the latter consistently showed lower fertility for all age groups up to 40, while there was a reversal in the age group 40 and above, where non-migrants exhibited lower fertility. The urban migrant wives showed a somewhat higher level of education, most likely on account of selectivity, compared to the non-migrants. According to the author, wife's education explains to a large extent the observed fertility differentials by residence background.

The article examines the impact of target setting on a Family Planning Program in the North Indian State of Uttar Pradesh. The author argues that over-concern with target setting has led to a number of negative results including high percentages of marginal cases brought for vasectomy, and low morale on the part of family planning personnel. Trained in extensive education techniques, they have been forced to place quantity above quality once they begin their work out in the districts. The author provides no easy answer to this tension between targets and extension educators, but the problem, which he has, raised needs consideration in a developing country concerned with implementing an effective program of population control. According to the author, the emphasis of the large incentive fee approach represents a rejection of the extension education approach. Extension educators' morale, which was already low, may have deteriorated further as less use was made of extension education techniques. Apparently, a quantity-oriented approach continues to take precedence over a quality-oriented extension education approach in the family planning program of Uttar Pradesh.

Research on KAP, communication extension, and administration of family planning in India has been selective with the result that backward, rural areas with poor family planning performance have been neglected. Reasons for this are logistic problems in carrying out research from the research institute, bad data from backward areas, and the possibility of damaging the public image of the programme. Three kinds of selective feedback occur about the problems of these rural, backward areas with poor family planning performance:- the level of medical infrastructure, the response rate of the population as related to infrastructural variables, and the level of information and innovation diffusion; this has led to the very special and interacting problems of these areas being ignored. A regional policy with flexible quantity and quality of programme input is required. This can be done by an efficient areal classification into `types of areas' for policy alternatives, by different spatial arrangements of services and extension to cater for varying situations, by varying the media mix, by varying optimum staffing numbers and combinations, and by reviewing the spatial allocation problem involved in the Intensive Districts Programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on vasectomy camps in Maharashtra. In 1957 the government of the state of Maharashtra recognized sterilization as an accepted method of limiting family size. A similar decision was taken by the government of India in 1959. Hence though sterilization was viewed much earlier as a possible method of contraception, vigorous action in the direction of popularizing vasectomy could not be taken by the state government until 1960. In fact, November 1960 was regarded as a vasectomy month in the state of Maharashtra and each of the 26 districts of the state was given a quota of 600 vasectomies to be performed during this campaign. According to the 1961 census, the total population of the state was 39,553,718. This meant a target of less than half a vasectomy per thousand populations. Though the target was not reached for each individual district, it was attained for the state as a whole. The number of vasectomy cases from different districts varied greatly, the range of variation being from no vasectomy to more than 2,000 vasectomies.

The study of fertility in any given society involves the study of the family and its institutional characteristics. Reproduction is one of the primary functions of the family, and it is through this that the society maintains itself against the hazards of mortality. This article examines fertility in relation to the age at return marriage using the data from a study in a rural area in India. The author discusses how the interval from return marriage to first birth is usually long among Indian women and explores the factors that contribute to the low incidence of childlessness in the country.

This article presents the results of a family planning attitude survey conducted in four villages near metropolitan Delhi, India. Information was obtained through questionnaires from married females of reproductive age. The author seeks to report the level of knowledge and awareness of women in family planning and birth control methods. The women thought that a family should have four children, and spacing between them should be roughly four years.