Barriers to higher education: commonalities and contrasts in the experiences of Hindu and Muslim young women in urban Bengaluru.

Gender inequalities in educational attainment have attracted considerable attention and this article aims to contribute to our understanding of young women's access to higher education. The article is based on our in-depth interviews with 26 Hindu and Muslim young women attending colleges in urban Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), south India, and explores the barriers they confronted in fulfilling their aspirations. We highlight the similarities amongst the young women, as well as the distinctive experiences of the Hindu and Muslim interviewees.

Contextualizing Women's Agency in Marital Negotiations: Muslim and Hindu Women in Karnataka, India.

We use 36 in-depth interviews, with 18 Muslim and 18 Hindu women in Karnataka, India, to explore the relationships between women's educational attainments and women's exercise of agency in spousal selection and the timing of marriage. We have outlined three kinds of agency, namely, convinced, resistance, and complicit, and the contexts in which they were deployed by our participants during their marriage negotiations. Our examination of the role of education across this spectrum of agential capacities during marriage negotiations suggests that the linkages between education and agency are not straightforward.

The impact of official development aid on maternal and reproductive health outcomes: a systematic review.

Background: Progress toward meeting Millennium Development Goal 5, which aims to improve maternal and reproductive health outcomes, is behind schedule. This is despite ever increasing volumes of official development aid targeting the goal, calling into question the distribution and efficacy of aid. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness represented a global commitment to reform aid practices in order to improve development outcomes, encouraging a shift toward collaborative aid arrangements which support the national plans of aid recipient countries (and discouraging unaligned donor projects).

Only when the boat has started sinking: a maternal death in rural north India.

This paper uses a close reading of villagers' responses to the death in childbirth of a Muslim woman to raise questions about India's current policy emphasis on institutional delivery as a means of reducing maternal mortality. After introducing the context and methods of our research, we describe recent policy interventions related to maternal health, including the National Rural Health Mission established in 2005. We then outline villagers' commentaries on the specific maternal death, focusing on the costs to women's health (and sometimes life) of high fertility; the lack of care available from rural government facilities and staff and the preference for delivering at home with the aid of local practitioners; the financial constraints that make people hesitate to seek medical treatment; and the high costs of private treatment and the poor treatment experienced in government facilities.

Unmonitored intrapartum oxytocin use in home deliveries: evidence from Uttar Pradesh, India.

Intrapartum use of oxytocin should entail controlled dosages administered through infusion, continual monitoring of mother and fetus and surgical back-up, since several adverse outcomes have been reported. However, in Uttar Pradesh, north India, small-scale ethnographic studies as well as a large-scale retrospective survey have established that unmonitored intramuscular oxytocin injections are commonly given to birthing mothers to augment labour by unregistered local male practitioners and auxiliary nurse-midwives employed by government during home deliveries. India's reproductive and child health policy needs to address the inappropriate use of oxytocin.