**_The_** _Rundun Projea_

_33_ avaiability of qualified females for the needed jobs was the main reason but it seems reasonable to assume that a higher proportion of females among staff members would have enabled the Project to achieve more success than it actually does.

The limitations of comparing the demographic Indices temporally and between the Project and Control Areas have been referred to above. The methods of data collection and compilation in the two Areas as well as the roles of the Project and the PHC in this respect are not clear. Lack of comparable data from the two Areas make it difficult to make a comprehensive assessment of the Project's impact on demographic and development indices.

# Comparison Between the Madab and Kundam Projects

The Matlab Project in Bangladesh and Kundam Project in India have demonstrated that significant success in family planning can be achieved in socioeconomic environments that are generally conducive to high fertility and mortality. It is, however, very difficult to strictly compare the specific impacts and strategies of the two projects because of a considerable difference in their documentation. The Matlab Project is one of the most well-documented experimental projects on family planning in developing countries, mostly because of the Demographic Surveillance System (DSS) developed by the ICDDR,B. The documentation of the Kundam Project is perhaps better than any other experimental family planning project carried out in rural India but is not sufficient for doing a comparative analysis with the Matlab Project.

Both the Projects are experimental in the sense that they are designed to have an experimental area which is provided with some special service inputs and a control areasocioeconomically and demographically more or less similar to the experimental area in the preproject period-which is not provided with any special input so that the changes brought about by the Project inputs can be distinguished from those occurring in the both areas by forces external to the project. There are other family planning projects in Bangladesh and India that claim significant success but because of a lack of experimental design, it is very difficult to assess the degree of their success. One common difficulty in setting up an experimental project is that it requires provision of continuous data collection in both experimental and control areas but without any service inputs in the control area-an action not always ethically justifiable. In both the Matlab and Kundam Projects, some ideas generated by the Projects in the experimental areas must have diffused to the control areas but such deviations from the ideal situation-almost inevitable in social experiments-are expected to vitiate the main findings only to a negligible extent.

The main strategies that are responsible for the success of the Matlab and Kundam Projects are quite different in nature. In Matlab, the Project took the responsibility of providing family planning and (some rudimentary) MCH services in the Treatment Area in a way that differs considerably from that of the government's program but in Kundam the Project took very litte responsibility for providing family planning and MCH services and tried to mobilize the community through formation of various committees and clubs in such a way that the community members can take the best possible advantage of the government's family planning and other development programs. The success of the Matlab Project can be attributed to various aspects of the organizational system developed for delivering a consumer-oriented family planning and MCH services, while the success of the Kundam Project can be attributed to various aspects of the