India

The degree of personal autonomy of women in India varies from state to state. Several studies have noted the regional variations in the status of women in India (Karve, 1965; Srinivas, 1978; Mitra, 1979; Dyson and Moore, 1983). Women’s personal autonomy is manifested in practices such as veiling (purdah or ghungat), pressures to get girls married at a very young age (partly to protect their virginity and partly to ensure compliance with parents’ wishes in respect of the choice of spouse), denying or limiting educational or employment opportunities to girls, attaching differential values to sons and daughters, restricting the ability of women to control their fertility by pressuring them to produce children (particularly male heirs), restricting their access to information, and economic and health resources etc.

Few community-based studies in India have investigated the determinants of women’s self-reports of reproductive tract infections and other forms of gynaecological morbidity. One of the most striking findings to emerge from the few that have done so is the strong association between the use of female sterilization, or in some cases the intrauterine device (IUD), and reported or diagnosed gynaecological morbidity.

“Pregnancy is special, let’s keep it safe” was the theme for World Health Day in 1998. Even if agreement existed on the best way to ensure a safe pregnancy in a resource-poor setting, provision is only half the story; the level and nature of the demand for a “safe” pregnancy also needs evaluating. How women themselves perceive the dangers of pregnancy and how they react to those dangers are important questions to answer.

The concept "status of women" eludes precise definition and hence precise measurement. Status can be perceived in different ways: the extent of a woman’s access to social and material resources within the family, community and society (Dixon, 1978), or her authority or power within the family/community and the prestige commanded from those other members (Mukerjee, 1975), or her position in the social system distinguishable from, yet related to, other positions (Committee on the Status of Women in India, 1974), or the extent to which women have access to knowledge, economic resources and political power as well as the degree of autonomy they have in decision making and making personal choices at crucial points in their life-cycle (United Nations, 1975). The idea of status also connotes the notion of equality (Krishnaraj, 1986). There can be self-perceived status, group-perceived status or objective status (Mukerjee, 1975), a situation which can lead to status inconsistency when a person is very high in one type of status and very low in another.

A commonly held belief in the 1970s was that price indices rise because of temporary noise, and then revert after a short interval (Cecchetti and Moessner, 2008). Accordingly, policy should not respond to the inflation because of these volatile components of the price indices. This led to the development of the concept of core inflation (Gordon, 1975), which is headline inflation excluding food and fuel inflation. It was strongly believed that in the long run, headline inflation converges to core inflation and that there are no second round effects (that is an absence of core inflation converging to headline inflation). In recent years, however, major fluctuations in food inflation have occurred. This has become a major problem in developing countries, such as India, where a large portion of the consumption basket of the people are food items. Against this backdrop, in the present paper, an attempt is made to measure the second round effects stemming from food inflation in India using the measure of Granger causality in the frequency domain of Lemmens, Croux and Dekimpe (2008). The results of empirical analysis show significant causality running from headline inflation to core inflation in India and as a result, the prevalence of the second round effects. They also show that food inflation in India is not volatile, and that it feeds into the expected inflation of the households, causing the second round effects. This calls for the Reserve Bank of India to put greater effort in anchoring inflation expectations through effective communication and greater credibility.

Improvements in health services, education and provision of safe drinking water, all have a desirable impact on child survival

The main reason for reinvestigating the possible linkage between consanguinity and offspring mortality emerged as a result of the gross disagreement among researchers on this subject. For the purpose of this study, consanguinity is defmed as marriage between relatives who share at least one common and detectable ancestor. There is no common consensus in the field of human genetics or demographic research regarding the biological impact of parental consanguinity on the health of their offspring. However, in this regard it is possible to recognize three broad schools of thought. Adherents of the first school consider that there is an overwhelming possibility of consanguineous parents having an unhealthy child. According to this school of thought, marriage between close relatives is genetically critical, because closely related individuals have a higher probability of carrying the same alleles than less closely related individuals. Consequently, an inbred child (the progeny of a consanguineous couple) will more frequently be homozygous for various alleles than the offspring of unrelated persons (Whittinghill, 1965). To the extent that homozygosity for genes is deleterious, consanguineous marriage is deleterious (Sutton, 1965). In this respect, the genetic load of deleterious recessive genes, usually known as the lethal equivalent, would cause death if present in homozygous combination (Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, 1971). A number of studies on this subject have focused on an increased level of morbidity (Bemiss, 1858; Rao and others, 1977; Ansari and Sinha, 1978) and mortality (Farah and Preston, 1982; Bundey and Alam, 1993; Bittles, 1994) among the offspring of consanguineous parents. Survey results from a few other sources have also identified a linkage between consanguinity and spontaneous abortion (Neel and Schul, 1962; Al-Awadi and others, 1986) and intrauterine loss (Saheb and others, 1981).

First sexual intercourse is a significant event in a man’s life, whether or not it happens within the context of marriage. In the wake of the HIV pandemic, sexual initiation before marriage has become a focus of attention. From an intervention point of view, the proportion of young people who are sexually active, especially before they form stable partnerships, is an important area of concern. Early age at sexual debut and the number of pre-marital partners have been shown to be correlated with risk behaviour later in life (White and others, 2000). Contextual data on sexual partners and circumstances are needed to understand and assess the risk associated with early sexual experiences, and thereby design appropriate policies and programmes.