family planning communication in india: the actors and the acts

This book is the first systematic study on the historiography of the family planning communication process in India. It traces the history of the development of a highly technical health communication process.

It discusses how the discourse on India’s population problem was at the heart of the development dialogue which was being promoted by the British colonial administration. The book examines the role of the censuses and the Five-Year plans in the development of the discussion on the population ’explosion’ in India. Also, it critically discusses the role of the Ford Foundation’s leadership in institutionalising the communication process in India. The book essentially argues that population control communication enabled the ideas of a homogenised nation, an ’ideal’ Indian woman and an ’ideal’ Indian family. This, in turn, led to the obliteration of cultural, ethnic, geographical and economic specificities of India as a country.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of public policy, media and communication studies, Indian politics, modern Indian history and South Asian Studies.

Shashwati Goswami is a Professor and Head of the department of Communication Research at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, India. Previously, as a communication professional, she has been associated with India’s national radio broadcaster, the All India Radio and BBC Media Action. As a media academic, she has received varied grants and fellowships from numerous research and academic organisations including Panos South Asia, Rockefeller Archive Centre, New York and E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University. Her areas of research and teaching are political economy of media, gender and media, health communication and development and conflict-zone journalism. She has been an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (Ph.D.), University of Delhi (MA) and Cotton College, Gauhati University (BA Hons).