Sri Lanka gained prominence in international policy circles as an apparent 'success story' first as a model colony in early 1950s and later as a development model for South Asia by 1970s. In naming Sri Lankan 'success story' experts pointed to the decreasing population growth rate and decreasing mortality. Renowned demographers attributed this to the improvements in the field of social indicators such as high literacy rates, increased life expectancy and rise in female age at marriage. In this 'success story' women's health serves as a linchpin to the attainment of national progress. But a focus on women's health – as statistics and indicators – has also served to silence questions about Sri Lankan women's broader experiences of their disaggregated health. In particular, while Sri Lankan 'women's health' served the Sri Lankan state's 'success story' well, what is less clear is how women's individual bodies have fared within subsequent tellings of its other twentieth century Sri Lankan stories of late colonial, national, developmental, neoliberal and militarised phases. My thesis examines this question through a critical examination of women's health history of this island nation. I trace its history from initial birth control, family planning (1953) to development population control to militarisation, financialisation of women's bodies and ends with a critical examination of recent policies that claim to emancipate women's health 'beyond' a myopic focus on their role as reproducer. Although women's health was vigilantly 'controlled' and 'planned' for the state building project and women's bodies were framed around the notion of social reproduction for the nation building project of post independent Sri Lanka, women were neither subjects nor objects of these two projects. Women's reproductive bodies were, rather, the ground for a complex and competing set of struggles on population, family planning, development, modernisation and ethno nationalism of post independent Sri Lanka. Further women's health/women's bodies analysis helps to elucidate the manner in which we can track the operation of power that serves to silence women's own corporeal subjectivity and to delimit the realms in which she can exercise her own agency.

Since the nineteenth century, social exclusion and inclusion have been prominent concepts in policy debates across Europe. This thesis discusses the fact that poverty and social exclusion are often seen as closely related, overlapping or even indistinguishable in the existing literature. Thus there are no uncontested definitions of poverty, social exclusion and inclusion, and these concepts remain the subject of definitional disagreements among intellectuals. This research has tried to bring out these concepts in a gender perspective on Bangladesh as a developing country, examining indigenous women’s status at the domestic and wider societal levels and recent developments in this. The data were collected using qualitative methods. Data analysis was done through the qualitative approaches that are presented by thematic analysis. The findings of this research indicate that the processes of social exclusion and inclusion of indigenous people, especially women, need to be addressed in a policy paper, since creating appropriate policy tools would be the best way of spreading – rather than imposing – the basic values and standards necessary to give a sense of inclusion to all the people of Bangladesh. At the same time, this research has highlighted the fact that, though Chakma and Garo indigenous women live in communities with different social structures – patriarchal for Chakma women and matrilineal for Garo women – in practice these two groups share common life experiences.