In the first section on population, the good old problem finds a brilliant exposition. The bulk of the material is, obviously, on gender biases, grouped together in the second section, addressing fertility decline, wife abuse, dowry, schooling and child health. By far the most relevant portion of the book, however, is the third section on women in the changing economic paradigm. The final section takes an academic look at the health programmes, reproductive health and the needs of elderly women.
The introductory chapter puts all these issues together—the gender perspective in population policy, gender quality and development strategies, and the ticklish issue of resource allocation. The volume, modestly and truly so, confesses that it is a partial analysis. It admits that there are only some policy thrusts that emerge. And these policy measures suggested are very sketchy indeed. The introduction underlines the need for deeper research and an ethical commitment by the intelligentsia on gender issues. Maithreyi Krishnaraj in her paper on economic theories of population points out the error in most theories, Malthusian and Marxist, in the sense that all these theories limit themselves to treating labour as a single category and therefore not analysing the uneven effects on women and their reproductive burden. Women invest their time
and energy into making a unit of labour—the child. And this they do without hope of immediate returns. Then why does reproductive labour of women not have a value?
Vijayendra Rao makes an econometric analysis of wife abuse and concludes it occurs because women have little choice in marriage, come with inadequate dowry and have to tolerate alcoholic husbands. Sterilisation leads to more abuse. And lack of contraceptive alternatives leaves them with the sterilisation option alone. Hence the need for economic independence, contraceptive practices, women's shelters, rationing of alcohol and a trained police force.
Female survival will be relatively low whenever women's participation in the labour force is low. The relatively lower gender differences in mortality in the south, where rice is the major crop, is an outcome of the female labour-intensive nature of rice cultivation. And the higher female mortality in the north a function of the exclusion of women in the plough-based or mechanised production of wheat. Daughters born into families that already have one daughter are found to be at a much higher risk of mortality than those born into families with a male less than three years older.
The unequal access to life for women in India is widespread and has cultural and economic roots, resulting in gender differentials. It speaks of practices followed towards them at the time of birth or even before in this age of sex discrimination tests, during early childhood and after that. A girl child is also systematically deprived of adequate access to health care, nutrition and education. Studies have shown that of the children brought to hospitals, the number of boys being brought for curative treatment far exceeds the number of girls.
Given the special vulnerability of women, their well-being reflects, to a large extent, the character of civil society itself. This attempt in putting together a set of eminently readable papers is an attempt in the right direction. With a bit more of policy thrust and a little less of ideology, the volume would have been much more of a successful venture.
