Family Planning Methods and Programs in India

The Family Welfare Programme in India has experienced significant growth and adaptation over the past half century since its inception in 1951. The direction, emphasis and strategies of the Family Welfare Programme have changed over time. Over the decades, there has been a substantial increase in contraceptive use in India. The contraceptive needs of considerable proportions of women and men and improving the quality of family planning services continue to be a challenge. The 1990s witnessed a growing recognition of this, and several innovative policy and programme initiatives have been launched to address these issues. The objective of this article is to trace the roots of this change in orientation, document the program's achievements to date and examine the challenges that remain at the policy level, at the implementation level and also reviews evidence from surveys and studies conducted in the 1990s and thereafter on contraceptive use dynamics for contraception in India. Declining fertility in large part is due to women’s increased use of contraception. For the first time ever, more than half of currently married women in India are using contraception, and their use of modern contraceptive methods increased from 43% to 49% between NFHS-2 and NFHS-3. This raises the question of whether the focus, priorities and responsibility