The second edition of Listening to Women Talk about their Health: Issues and Evidence from India comes at an opportune time. The establishment of a womens agency, UN Women, in January 2011, the launch of the UN Secretary-Generals Global Strategy on Womens and Childrens Health in 2010, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) High Level Summit in September 2010 and the addition in 2007 of universal access to reproductive health by 2015 as a target in MDG 5 to improve maternal health constitute major highlights of the growing attention accorded to womens health globally. The High-level Summit on the MDGs in 2010 recognized the lack of progress made on the MDG 5 targets in particular. Since then, several global, regional and national initiatives on womens health, in particular in sexual and reproductive health, have been announced. The launch of this second edition capitalizes on the emerging public awareness and the growing momentum to provide widely accessible, women-sensitive reproductive health services.
To contextualize the contents within the contemporary global health scenario, the new edition includes an excellent new preface by Margaret Hempel and Vanita Nayak Mukherjee of the Ford Foundation as well as a prologue by Saroj Pachauri. Collectively, these pieces take stock of the broad but key changes that have occurred at the global policy level since the books first publicationand in particular, in Indiain the field of sexual and reproductive health, and make a strong case for the continued relevance of the publication, 17 years after its first edition. The contents are ample evidence of this case.