Perspectives on Sexual Reproductive Health

Saroj Pachauri narrates the story of her five decades’ long career.She worked to make a difference in the lives of the poor.An interwoven tapestry is presented of the various threads of her own work life and the different roles that she played in the history and evolution of the sexual and reproductive health and rights field detailing the sequential occurrences and the assorted twists and turns. Thus a biographical account of her own work life is interfaced with the history and evolution of public health family planning maternal health sexual and reproductive health and rights poverty gender adolescents and youth and HIV and AIDS.Part I of the booka chronology of her life is a biographical narration by her daughter Dr.Rashmi Pachauri Rajan of what work she undertook during her 50 years’ career. Part II is her autobiography describing how she worked. The first nine years of her career as a faculty member of Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the Delhi University and subsequently at the Banaras Hindu University are delineated. She worked in Chapel Hill North Carolina with the International Fertility Research Program (IFRP) during 1971-1975. Her experiences with designing and monitoring clinical trials to assess the safety and effectiveness of fertility control technologies and with organising a programme of policy advocacy to incorporate technologies found to be safe and effective within national programme are discussed. She joined the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Office in 1983. Her eleven years’ sojourn with the Foundation during which she supported programmes on sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV and AIDS is discussed. Her struggles to help change the paradigm from a top-down population control approach for meeting demographic goals to a client-centred programme for addressing reproductive health needs is narrated.