There are more young people alive today than ever before-over a billion between the ages of 15 and 24-and with more of them sexually active, countries are increasingly grappling with the controversial issue of sexual and reproductive health education. According to the just-released report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), nearly half of all countries have taken new measures to address the reproductive health needs of adolescents, as they were urged to do at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, writes Subir Ghosh

The politics of fertility control is all about power and control exerted by various stakeholders over individual lives and limited resources. It is about the role of the state in regulating individual behaviour. Its starts with the specification of the rationale for government involvement in policies to alter human behaviour related to reproduction and sexuality. These policies also seek to justify the means adopted by the government to influence fertility behaviour. Anrudh Jain starts of with some hard facts, argues Subir Ghosh

A decade before the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, several nongovernmental organisations, researchers, women's groups and donors in India had sought to change programme direction by moving away from demographic targets and numbers and focusing on how to address the needs of clients, especially women. NGOs and feminists who had formed pressure groups were in the forefront of advancing this agenda, says Subir Ghosh

Former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David F. Noble's new work is a truly powerful, brilliant exposé on the foundations of our current global crisis. His premise is deeply subversive -over-arching and, the results are directly immediate to the groundings and strategies for activism--especially in the land of evangelical Minnesota NICE, points out Drew Hempel

The problem with these kind of books in a fast-changing world and a country where Prime Ministers come and go is that while the perceptions of the past remain unchanged, the conclusions part become hopelessly outdated and irrelevant. VP Dutt, with his new volume on India's foreign policy, will remain on safe ground for the moment - the just-concluded polls ensuring that there is no change of guard at New Delhi, asserts Subir Ghosh