The burden and stress of coping with rapid and varied changes somehow appears to fall heavily on the women in the household. The second is the tendency of policy workers to focus on the virtue of women's caring role in order to obviate the necessity for state intervention in this field. Maintaining the tradition of caring for the aged has become burdensome and stressful. Supportive measures like insurance schemes and nursing care through community groups could ease the load considerably. Indeed, they will become imperative in the future, when smaller families will not be able to undertake the responsibilities they are expected to carry now.
Women are inevitably at the centre of the household as an economic unit.
However, the imperatives of their role in the wider sphere of economic activity outside the home may encounter cultural barriers which inhibit their effectiveness there. The project revealed the tenacity with which both men and women safeguard the household as the basic social unit. The evidence of changing male and female attitudes towards specified activities and, to a lesser extent, of changes in the activities themselves, is central to the issue of the impact of development. Though these have occurred both within and beyond the domestic sphere, there has been very little change in the conceptualization of gender roles. Indeed, the strong acceptance of traditional perceptions and norms suggests substantive change in this area is unlikely.