Babus and babies

The National Population Policy 2000 has a nice, kind, millennial ring to it. For a start, it uses the right words. The wicked jargon of ``...

The National Population Policy 2000 has a nice, kind, millennial ring to it. For a start, it uses the right words. The wicked jargon of “coercion” and “forced sterilisations” that had permanently blotted Indira Gandhi’s copybook is nowhere in evidence. Family planning is now all about “promotional” and “motivational” measures. Indeed, while dusting down the Swaminathan Committee’s draft national population policy of 1994, the Union government seems to have picked its way through a minefield of controversies and brought forth a thoroughly sanitised document.

The contentious issue of debarring those with more than two children from standing for public office was quietly dropped. This, all considered, is a wise move, seeing that such a step would have seriously undermined democratic access to political power. In an equally adroit step, the government used the new policy as a excuse to postpone, until the year 2026, the delimitation of constituencies by arguing that this would amount to punishing states that had fared better on the population front by pruning down their electoral representation.

The document also attempted to reflect the concerns of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo. That conference had held that no single solution would work in slowing down population growth, and that a broader policy that addresses general poverty, ill health, illiteracy and the poor status of women would produce better results. But conceptualising effective policies is one thing, implementing them effectively is another. While India’s latest policy talks about providing antenatal check-ups, trained birth attendants and more facilities for safe abortion, it is remarkably quiet about shoring up the general health of the population. This has been the tragic flaw in family planning administration in this country. While malaria and tuberculosis rages in large areas, primary health centres are in a shambles.

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There is an attempt made in the latest policy to reward women who manage to stave off matrimony until they are 19. Which is all very well, but how do individual women do this in a society that has disempowered them in a hundred ways? Similarly, the Union health minister talks vaguely about “increasing the participation of men in planned parenthood” but his government’s policy is not very forthcoming on how this can be achieved.

The states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, which have long been clubbed under the infamous acronym BIMARU, are believed to account for over 40 per cent of the country’s population growth. Yet, here again, the policy is short on how it plans to address the special needs of these states. Of course, there is the provision for a technology mission within the Department of Family Welfare, to provide focused attention for “under-performing states”. But how the Mission proposes to go about its task is left tantalisingly unstated. There are no fewer than three new commissions envisaged in the new policy. This may provide some employment to the underworked babus of the ministry of health and family welfare, but whether it would make a difference to the country’s population growth rates is an open question.

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