In a country of more than one billion people, with 20 odd principal languages, about 225 dialects, and at least two principal religions, it is difficult to say anything about a phenomenon like childbirth that would hold true for the different regions and peoples of India. But what can be said is that about 65% of the births are at home in opposition to perhaps 3% in the United States. If we break this down into rural and urban, then more than 70% of births in rural India are at home with about 74% of the total population living in rural India. And two thirds of these rural births are attended by family and other forms of local experts, which in the current anthropological and public health literature are called either dais, or traditional birth attendants (TBAs). Both are omnibus terms meaning many things depending on the context in which they are used. This has led Sarah Pinto (2006) to argue that the Indian dai, cast in the image of the European midwife, as someone who attends to the pregnant woman, delivers the child, the afterbirth and does post partum work may not necessarily exist in one person, or not in one person at all times and in all regions of India. Even the general consensus that in “North India”, (including Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh), the dai’s main task is not catching the baby (any of the many women who attend the birth may do so) but cutting the cord and subsequently removing “the polluted and dangerous” placenta is contradicted by the fact that among the very poor the dai is virtually never called. If called, she does not necessarily cut the cord. Instead the cord is cut by the mother as otherwise the child may turn its affection towards the dai rather than the mother (Blanchet 1984).