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Journalism of Courage
For years, it has been one of those futuristic nightmares that have kept Indian demographers, population experts and the bureaucrats in the health and family welfare ministry awake at nights. Well, the truth is that the nightmare is upon us.
We, the people8230;are now a billion and constitute a neat one-sixth of the human race. At present levels of growth, India would touch 1.4 billion by the year 2025 and in another decade or so would have achieved the distinction of being the country with the largest population in the world, having left the hitherto ubiquitous Chinese behind. In fact, it could be well over 1.5 billion before population levels stabilise some time between 2056 and 2061.
Then came the 1977 Lok Sabha verdict which proved the undoing of an arrogant political order. So devastating was the impact of that political message that for a decade, family planning 8212; later sanitised to family welfare 8212; remained poorly articulated in the public sphere. To this day, politicians in north India fight shy of talking about contraceptive concerns on public fora for fear of the retributive rotten egg!
In hindsight, the experiences of the Emergency provided a much-needed corrective to a mindset that regarded people like the beads of an abacus to be manipulated at will. The work of social economists like Amartya Sen and the experiences of health functionaries working in villages and small towns confirmed two basic demographic phenomena.One, that family welfare measures minus social welfare is self-defeating.
Lowering population levels crucially hinge on the quality of life that people enjoy and not so much on the efficacy of the state8217;s family welfare machinery. Literacy and gender justice has done more to prevent births than the large-scale implantation of intra-uterine devices IUD in unsuspecting women or the mass marketing of suppositories. Two, that family welfare measures minus health initiatives is also self-defeating.
Take the experience of Tamil Nadu. Unlike Kerala, it did not have the advantages of high literacy levels, yet it achieved significant progress in bringing down its growth levels. What seems to have helped immeasurably was the holistic approach that the state8217;s health functionaries adopted. There was a conscious emphasis placed on immunising infants, conducting prenatal check-ups, despatching health workers on regular visits, organising mothers8217; meetings, and so on, instead of the mechanical promotion of condomsand sterilisations. In fact, once the general health aspects were addressed, the demand for condoms and sterilisations followed. Insights such as these gleaned from than five decades of family welfare administration could help immensely in addressing the billionium bug8217;.
