Articles by Vina Mazumdar

The revolutionary changes which followed the two world wars created for a and structures that promoted debates on women's rights. By the beginning of the 1990s however, the international context in which the struggle for the advance of women's rights was being waged had been transformed. Debates being actively promoted today twist the very premises and values on which the movement had been based. It is against the background of these developments which have influenced the women's movement in India that one must evaluate the goals and directions of the movement and locate its strengths and weaknesses.

above points to a major problem in the debate on public expenditures. One expenditure is counterpoised against another whose choice is mostly arbitrary: It is argued on page 144 that subsidy on food should be targeted to the poor and scope of PDS ought to be limited. If the salaried employees are indexed fully as argued elsewhere, and PDS does not cover them then would that not lead to increased expenditures on account of salaries? It is not even clear that the salaried employees are responsible for inflation. Their salaries only respond to an ongoing inflation.

WOMEN Women's Studies: Challenge to Educational System Vina Mazumdar SINCE the early seventies, there his been a slow but steady expansion of investigations on problems of women. The Report on the Committee on the Status of Women, in India demolished many established and popular notions about trends and issues in women's status, compelling hard rethinking among some policymakers, social scientists and organisations working for women's rights. The decision of the Indian Council of Social Science Research to sponsor a programme of research on the problems and conditions of poor, rural ,and other groups of-'invisible' women, hitherto neglected by social scientists, resulted in Involving a number of scholars some very eminent and established, others less known, and some young researchers from the universities in a purposive set of investigations which have increasingly provided substantial empirical support for some of the rather startling and disturbing observations of the Committee on the Status of Women. The symbolic pressure of the International Women's Decade encouraged some persons in universities and other institutions to take up some research on women. At the same time, the new awareness of the growing problems, including crimes and violence against women, gave birth to a number of new, more militant women's organisations, and activised some of the older organisations also to take up issues like rape and dowry deaths. The pressure was also felt by trade unions and other organisations mobilising different groups of exploited workers in urban and rural areas. The gradual manifestation of this process, or the communication channels through which the pressure travelled has not been documented or analysed. .There is little doubt, however, that the increasing attention to women in some sections of the media, or the number of seminary, conferences and other gatherings provided some conduits for the process.