BACKGROUND: Epidemiological data indicates that organized cytology based cervical cancer screening has a major impact on morbidity and mortality from cervical cancer in the developed countries. Cytology based screening cannot be provided on a large scale in developing countries where about 80% of the disease abound, probably due to technical, socioeconomic and geographical barriers. HPVDNA testing has been proposed as an alternative cervical cancer screening to cytology testing in patient with abnormalities on aided visual inspection of the cervix. OBJECTIVE: The overall goal of the study is to compare the performance of HPV (DNA) versus liquid based cytology (LBC) testing in diagnosing premalignant lesion of cervix in women with abnormalities on aided visual inspection of the cervix with lugol iodine (VILI) against gold standard histopathology. STUDY DESIGN: In this study, 2031 respondents who made inclusion criteria were recruited. Out of which 250 respondents were VILI positive and were studied further (VILI positive women were subjected to HPVDNA testing/LBC and then colposcopy directed biopsies for definitive diagnosis and treatment if indicated. The remaining 1781 VILI negative clients were counselled on the need for routine cervical cancer screening / gynecologic recall. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Data obtained was analyzed using the Epi-Info 3.5.3/ SPSS version 16 to generate descriptive statistics. Chi-square with Yates correction or fisher test was used as appropriate to find the significance of study parameters on categorical scale between two or more groups. Diagnostic statistics viz. Sensitivity, Specificity, PPV, NPV, PL, NL and accuracy was computed with standard formulae to find the correlation of screening tests and while Mc Nemar’s test was used, to test for a statistically significant difference in the sensitivities, specificities, PPV, NPV, PL, NL and accuracy between the tests. Inter-rater agreement was calculated using the Cohen’s kappa