A significant change in the National Population Policy 2000 has been the introduction of HIV/AIDS. Linking population dynamics to HIV/AIDS has generated whole lot of new issues in the area of reproductive health, sexuality, sexual networking, male involvement in reproductive health, mapping of high risk groups, awareness of risks, authority of woman in decision making at family level, and role of community support. It may be stressed that all these issues have led to disenchantment with positivism and scientism, and established importance of social constructivism, yielding self-reports, qualitative studies, and discourse analysis as methodological tools. Situation analysis and mapping, with involvement of community members rather than trained researchers, have become the most important tools with donors and policy makers.

Today population research in India is closely linked with achievement of MDGs. It has contributed to achievement of MDGs by studying the degree of success in achieving MDGs in different cultural and regional contexts and explaining causes of successes and failures. It has helped in identifying various organizational and supply side gaps in the implementation of the strategies and programmes.