This paper examines the hypothesis that contraceptive use of illiterate women having literate partners (proximate literates), may be higher than that of illiterate women whose partners too are illiterates (isolate illiterates) using Demographic Health Survey data for India (2005-2006). Results...

Literature on family planning considers natural (also called traditional) contraceptives to be ‘ineffective’ because its users are not motivated to control their fertility. While this is true for initial stages of fertility transition, studies have reported that it is women belonging to...

Livestock production, especially dairy, has long been an important activity for smallholder and resource-poor farmers in India, both for household nutrition and income. Most of the livestock are kept in mixed farming systems, where crop residues, mainly cereal straws have been an important feed...

Becker’s analysis of crime and punishment has initiated a series of theoretical and empirical works investigating the determinants of crime. However, there is a dearth of literature in the context of developing countries. This paper is an attempt to address this deficiency. The paper...

Throughout the world child labour has been an area of lively debate for about a decade with many different viewpoints on the issue. It is argued that in developing countries with poverty, inequality, social norms, credit-land-labour market imperfections, high fertility and unpredictable...

Child labour is in focus for last two decades as it robs children of the chance to enhance human capital. This paper examines the Indian situation using data from 50th, 55th and 61st rounds of NSSO Surveys. Child Workers have declined from 9.1 million in 1993 to 5.8 million in 2004, declining by...

Employment creation and wage security have been primary goals of developing countries both from a national and a regional perspective. The present paper analyses the wage-employment scenario in India in the post-reform period with special emphasis on the regional dimension. The workforce...

Primary completion rates of Muslims in West Bengal are substantially lower than that of upper caste communities as well as backward castes, scheduled castes and tribes. Further, analysis of age-specific pcr indicates that differences in pcr between Muslims and other communities may have actually...

The low level of literacy within the Muslim community is traditionally explained in terms of the conservative values characterising Muslim society. Based on a field survey of slum dwellers in selected areas of Kolkata, this article argues that economic factors and uncertainties in the labour...

Tertiarisation of labour market has globally been associated with economic progress. But in developing countries, labour market deformities may push people into service economy out of distress also. This paper examines the tertiarisation process in Indian labour market to bring out the reasons...