Girl child in India: a bibliographic compendium

Awareness generation on the girl child is a recent slogan but not without a history. Since 1975, there has been a growing interest in women's lives, the family, unequal resource distribution and so on. The child as a category has not received. nearly the same attention- either in research or in policy-although children are a large age category in India. But it has become increasingly evident that girl children are particularly discriminated against in terms of access to health care, nutrition, education and they have a low status, and are, therefore, a barely visible category. This low status is further borne out by the growing incidence of sex tests, foeticide and a deliberate neglect of female infants.

This bibliography attempts to provide an overview of the existing literature on the issues relating to the girl child and also points out to some dark areas as well. The information contained in over 2000 bibliographical entries in the present work has been distilled from about 50 secondary reference sources, 225 periodicals and newspapers, about 650 research theses, research papers from. over 60 conferences and a number of books and monographs. Spread over 12 chapters, entries are arranged broadly under Situational Analysis. Social Attitutes, Family and Socialization, Health, Nutrition and Physical Growth, Education, Child Marriage, Crimes against the Girl Child, Delinquency and Institutionalized Care, Work and employment. Media, Programmes and policies, Audio-visual materials. Extensive. name, keywords and geographical area indexes are provided for easy access. Various appendices list conferences, secondary reference sources. names of periodicals and newspapers indexed, library collections. visited and organisations working on the Girl Child.