“History seems to stand still in Bengal, a province which once played a pioneering role in the nineteenth-century social reform movement. For over a century now, in spite of the drastic politico-economic changes and social upheavals that Bengal has witnessed, important indicators of women’s well-being continue to display alarming trends in the region. Colonial censuses as well as recent data indicate low work participation rates of women, along with very high incidences of underage marriage and widowhood in agrarian Bengal—higher than most other parts of India.
”

[Source: Orient Blackswan]