Although India has been recognized as the first country in the world to officially adopt a family planning program in 1952, serious thinking about population growth was reflected only through the subsequent five year plans. Even then policy makers failed to grasp the statistics behind the booming numbers. One of the measures adopted to curb population growth was in the nature of financial incentives in the form of cash awards for undergoing sterilisation; extensive use of sterilization for both males and females. The UPA Government’s three-pronged strategy to stabilize population growth should therefore be seen as a much needed correction.
Policy makers had always put too much attention into meeting targets rather than on basic welfare measures such as education and economic development as levers to restrict the growth of population. Such a lopsided strategy was bound to fail because adoption of family planning in India was never properly explained in terms of the various socio-cultural and economic factors. For instance the low age of marriage particularly in rural India contributed to high fertility. Further owing to prevalence of illiteracy, low status of women, deep rooted religious beliefs and customs besides the economic advantages of having a large size family has led to a mindset which is not amenable to the government’s family planning programs. For instance as a result of respect accorded to women on the basis of the number of children especially of a son, women were encouraged to go in for larger families to offset the incidence of high Infant Mortality Rate (IMR). Only in the last few years a broader perspective was adopted in the form of family welfare programs. The MS Swaminathan Expert Group on National Population Policy had called for the implementation of Minimum Needs Program. This includes the universalization of primary education, abolition of child labour, priority to primary health care and food-clothing-shelter programs.
State wise analysis of data pertaining to birth and death rates reveal that some states have a very high birth rate while states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu have achieved a low birth rate and in this sense have entered what demographers’ term as the third stage of transition characterized by low death rate and low birth rate. This has invariably resulted in population growth getting stabilized. One of the point in the Prime Minister’s three pronged strategy calls for a balanced regional development to stabilize population. Some of the concerns here include performance of certain states in areas of Human Development Index (HDI). Regions along the Hindi cow belt most notably the BIMORU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) are lagging behind on the HDI such as gender inequality, illiteracy, and poverty. Therefore unless an impact by the family planning programs is made on these States, India as a whole will not be able to enter the third stage of demographic transition of low birth and death rate, the stage of stable population size.
Historically it has been observed that death rate can be brought down more easily because the measures to reduce it are exogenous in nature and hence readily acceptable to the people. However reduction of birth rate can be brought about only by operating on factors like changing social attitudes on customs, beliefs, dogmas, about size of the family, about marriage. This requires a much longer and sustained effort. One hopes that the new pronged stratagem as announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would bring about a paradigm shift in the bureaucratic machinery. The unfeasible policy aimed primarily on birth control and clinical methodology should now give way to a multi-pronged attack on various aspects which are responsible for high birth rate.
