- Convenor:
-
Karan Babbar
(Plaksha University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Decolonising knowledge, power & practice
Short Abstract
This panel decolonises SRH, challenging colonial logics of population control. We explore how researchers, policymakers and grassroots agencies from the Global South reclaim bodily autonomy and forge new futures for reproductive justice, moving beyond top-down development models.
Description
This panel focuses on Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) as a critical area of debate shaped by colonial histories of demographic control and the top-down imposition of Western biomedical norms. This legacy perpetuates power imbalances and marginalises indigenous and local knowledge systems. Moving beyond critique, this panel explores the concrete ways in which grassroots power and agency are being asserted to decolonise the field.
This panel invites contributions exploring how social movements, indigenous midwives, queer rights activists, community organisers, and others are forging alternative SRH futures grounded in reproductive justice and collective wellbeing. The panel seeks to stimulate debate on key issues in the field. The questions below are intended as prompts, and proposals that engage with the broader theme of decolonising SRH from other perspectives are warmly welcomed:
How are neo-colonial power dynamics in funding and policy being resisted and dismantled?
What evidence showcases the impact and sustainability of community-led models of care versus traditional top-down approaches?
How do intersecting crises, from climate change to digital surveillance, reshape the struggle for reproductive justice?
A final key question is whether a decolonial approach requires moving beyond the SRH "development" framework entirely, towards paradigms of sovereignty, healing, and liberation.
Submissions are strongly encouraged from both academics and practitioners, and contributions using diverse methodologies are welcome. By bridging rigorous analysis with on-the-ground experience, this panel will create a vital space for radically rethinking SRH, not as a development intervention, but as a fundamental practice of justice.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper critiques how Indian marriages impose pregnancy as obligation and shows how women and grassroots groups resist these pressures. It argues for decolonising SRH by asserting bodily autonomy and recognising reproductive choice not motherhood as central to justice.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how expectations of pregnancy within marriage in India continue to reproduce colonial, caste-patriarchal, and demographic-control logics that position women’s bodies as sites of obligation. In many communities, marriage is framed as a transition into motherhood, with family, religious norms, and state policies reinforcing reproduction as a duty rather than a choice. These pressures echo historical population-management agendas that have long shaped India’s SRH landscape, marginalising women’s autonomy and indigenous knowledge systems. Drawing on insights from grassroots organisers, community health workers, and young married women resisting compulsory motherhood, the paper explores how individuals and collectives are redefining reproductive decision-making as a matter of bodily sovereignty. Narratives from Dalit feminist groups, indigenous midwives, and queer-affirming SRH advocates illustrate the diverse strategies through which communities challenge pronatalist expectations from community-led counselling networks and culturally rooted contraceptive practices to public campaigns that reframe child-free marriages as legitimate and dignified. The paper also considers how contemporary challenges economic precarity, climate anxieties, and the rise of digital surveillance in welfare and health systems intensify scrutiny over married women’s reproductive choices, while simultaneously sparking new solidarities for reproductive justice. Ultimately, the paper argues that decolonising SRH in the Indian context requires decoupling marriage from compulsory reproduction and transforming state and social narratives that cast pregnancy as a marital mandate. Instead, it calls for approaches grounded in sovereignty, healing, and liberation, positioning reproductive choice as central to women’s full personhood and justice.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how indigenous identity causally influences maternal healthcare utilisation among tribal women in India. It questions dominant policy assumptions and calls for decolonising understandings of maternal health by centring indigenous contexts in rethinking equitable care in practice.
Paper long abstract
Maternal health policies in Global South have long been shaped by inherited models of healthcare need that often overlook indigenous populations and lived realities. Maternal health remains a critical public health concern among tribal women in India, a historically marginalised population with distinct socio-cultural conditions and traditional beliefs. Tribal identity is often framed as being associated with poverty, remoteness, and marginalisation, which constrain maternal healthcare use. Using National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data from four states—Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh—this paper examines how indigenous identity causally influences maternal healthcare utilisation among tribal women and how agency and structural barriers shape this relationship. The study employs inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) and moderation analysis. The findings show that tribal identity does not reduce antenatal care uptake and is associated with comparable or, in Madhya Pradesh, higher utilisation than non-tribal women. In contrast, being tribal consistently lowers the probability of institutional delivery across all four states. These results raise questions about effectiveness of the financing policy Janani Suraksha Yojana, which provides incentives for hospital births. Further moderation analysis shows that media exposure increases antenatal care utilisation and narrows delivery gaps, while cumulative access barriers substantially depress both antenatal care and institutional delivery. Greater decision-making autonomy is associated with higher antenatal use but not with comparable gains in institutional delivery. The findings point to the need to decolonise dominant policy assumptions underlying maternal healthcare provision and to develop understandings of care that are more attentive to indigenous contexts and lived realities.
Paper short abstract
Using repeated cross-sectional survey data, the paper examines effects of an Indian family planning programme on contraceptive use and related behaviours through conditional DiD within relevant states, finding higher usage and shifts in the method mix (modern vs. traditional; spacing vs. limiting).
Paper long abstract
This paper uses multiple waves of the Indian National Family Health Survey to evaluate the effects of a family planning programme on contraceptive use and related reproductive behaviours. Using two rounds of this nationally representative repeated cross-section microdata, the paper implements a conditional difference-in-differences design that compares changes in targeted areas to comparison areas, restricting the analysis to programme states so that treated and comparison units share a common policy and institutional context. The conditional specification relaxes the standard parallel-trends assumption by allowing outcome trends to vary with the baseline fertility and contraceptive usage practices; the programme effect is therefore identified conditional on these pre-existing differences between the treatment and control groups. The main specifications include area-wise fixed effects and standard errors clustered at the level of treatment. The paper also presents robustness checks which consider alternative ways of conditioning on baseline fertility, placebo outcomes, and reweighting approaches. The paper estimates the effects of the programme on both overall contraceptive use and method composition, distinguishing modern and traditional methods as well as spacing and limiting behaviours. Accordingly, it finds an increase in overall contraceptive use, accompanied by shifts in the method mix, underscoring the importance of assessing not only adoption but also the composition of contraceptive behaviour in programme evaluations.