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Accepted Paper:

Maternity policies in Northern India: issues and implementation of maternal and child healthcare programs  
Clémence Jullien (Univeristé Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Paper short abstract:

Motherhood which has depended on traditional midwives is becoming a medicalized and institutionalized experience in India. Based on an ethnographic investigation in Jaipur and Delhi, this paper considers how motherhood is constructed through negotiations among doctors, Hindu nationalists, NGO workers and the urban poor for whom such projects are designed and implemented.

Paper long abstract:

As the Indian census 2011 shows, population growth, the rate of maternal and infant mortality, and the unbalanced sex ratio remain high in North India. In response to these societal developments, both national government schemes and a proliferating number of local and international NGOs are creating reproductive health care programs that will guarantee access to healthcare and reduce the maternal and child mortality rates. On the basis of one year of fieldwork in Jaipur and Delhi, I have found that, beyond the stated objectives they have, state and medical actors work according to very different notions of reproductive health, the body, gender, and the medicalization.

I have worked in three ethnographic settings: with the members of an international NGO in urban slums, with a main government maternity care hospital and with a Hindu nationalist association, Sewa Bharti Delhi. I use these three perspectives in my thesis, in which I compare the rhetoric and practices of reproductive healthcare programs from the points of view of the state, civil society, and the urban poor.

Thus, in this paper, I analyze the moral standards, forms of knowledge and power, and techniques that doctors, NGOs, and Hindu nationalist volunteers rely on to attempt to educate the urban poor of North India. I complement this analysis with life stories of women and traditional midwives in urban slums. Such stories give insight into how women reappropriate these state and civil projects, and how such projects affect their knowledge and conception of motherhood.

Panel P07
Knowledge, power and health in South Asia: historical tensions and emerging issues
  Session 1