India's government has backed off asking female civil servants questions that the women said were too nosy and had nothing to do with job performance. At issue was a new form requiring female government employees to disclose all details about their monthly menstrual cycles as well as when they had last requested maternity leave. There was no comparable survey form for male civil servants.

Almost 10 percent of India's 4,000 civil servants are women and many of them had vocally objected to a gender-specific appraisal form.

"I have absolutely no words to describe how I feel and I have no intention of telling them anything about my personal life. I am gob smacked," said Sharwari Gokhale, environment secretary in western Maharashtra state, BBC news reported.

Seema Vyas, joint secretary for general administration in the Indian state Maharashtra, had called the new rule "insensitive," the Kaiser Family Foundation noted in a statement on its website on Friday.

The new performance appraisal form was introduced in March. It had a three-page health section exclusively for women that demanded a "detailed menstrual history," information on their "last confinement," and their history of pap smears and mammograms, Bahrain's Gulf Daily newspaper reported Friday.

In announcing its decision to discard the objectionable form, a personnel ministry official said the decision was made "considering the sensitivity of the issue." The official added that a new appraisal from "deleting those female-specific clauses will be issued shortly," the Gulf Daily reports.

The decision was made following a series of protests that embarrassed the government, BBC news reported Friday.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP and women's activist Brinda Karat, who approached India's prime minister to intervene on the matter, called the decision a "victory for common sense," the BBC reported.

India's civil service, one of the nation's largest employers, requires annual appraisals and health checks. The replacement form will have men and women bureaucrats record similar details concerning routine health check-ups covering such things as blood reports and cardiac profiles.