Population policy fails to deliver

Nearly 50 years after India recognised that its burgeoning population, far from being an asset, could prove to be its biggest handicap, the country is yet to formulate a comprehensive population policy.

Thousands of crores of rupees have been allocated for family planning schemes in the past five decades, but population stabilisation remains by far an elusive goal.

From 361 million in 1951, the turn of the century will find the population crossing the billion landmark. The record of nearly 50 years of family planning programmes in India is pitiful when compared to the kind of progress made in other South Asian countries.

Recognising the dangers of a population explosion, the first government under Jawaharlal Nehru chalked out a state-sponsored family planning programme. That was in 1951.

But the programmes were never given the kind of priority they deserved, and the record of implementation in the states was spotty at best. The attack on the root cause of rampant population growth, namely high infant and child mortality coupled with high illiteracy, especially female illiteracy, was also begun at the same time.

Indira Gandhi’s imposition of Emergency saw family planning programmes being reduced almost to pogroms. Bureaucrats faced with the prospect of fulfilling quotas, hectored and bullied the populace to round up their numbers.

After the excesses committed in the name of population control during the Emergency, family planning became a dirty word. In the post-Emergency phase, the tendency was to swing the other way. The fallout of the withdrawal symptoms that afflicted family planning programmes meant that even the most routine of schemes languished or were pursued in a lackadaisical manner.

With India poised to acquire the distinction of the world’s most populous country by 2001, pushing aside China from the top slot, the need for a sharply-focussed policy becomes more than an imperative.

It is not as if high-powered committees and experts have not discussed the issue threadbare. From Indira Gandhi to Morarji Desai to Rajiv Gandhi to Narasimha Rao and now, I.K. Gujral, which Prime Minister has not paid lip service to population control and promised a strategy to come to grips with the issue.

Successive governments have promised much by way of a population policy and strategy, but failed to deliver.

In 1994, noted economist M.S. Swaminathan was roped in to draw up a draft population policy by the Narasimha Rao government. The Swaminathan draft recommended a number of drastic changes in the appraoch to the problem. It got as far as being tabled in Parliament, and has been gathering dust ever since.

Late last year, the Department of Family Welfare came out with its own version of a Statement on National Population Policy, borrowing largely from the Swaminathan draft. But, according to population experts, the isolation of the policy from social realities has meant that the entire exercise was rendered futile.

As has almost become mandatory, in his speech on Independence Day this year, Gujral too promised to come out with a national population policy. The Department of Family Welfare is reportedly working at hammering out such a plan.

But there is a danger here, as a uniform policy may not suit the varied needs of the entire country.

While states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, are on one end of the spectrum having a birth rate considerably less than even the 2000 AD goal of 21 per thousand, there is the phenomenon of the four Hindi-speaking states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. These four problem-ridden states, clubbed together under the fitting acronym BIMARU, fare the worst when it comes to all social indicators: be it birth rate, literacy, infant mortality or life expectancy.

Since it is these four states which form 40 per cent of India’s population and account for about 42 per cent of the increase in the country’s population, there is need for a region-specific strategy which takes into account the inheritance of social backwardness and illiteracy and in recent years the history of political instability which have made it difficult to implement population programmes with any degree of consistency.

The latest slogan of the Health Ministry promoting the one-child family norm comes at a time when even the Chinese, realising the folly of enforcing such a rule, have changed their tune.

In India, where the survival of children cannot be a surety, where there is a premium on having at least two sons before having a girl child, such a regimen would only result in people resorting to pre-natal sex tests and getting rid of females foetuses in their desire to have a single male child.The social pressures of having at least one male child, if not more, would imply that the “one is fun” slogan would remain just that.

For the thousands of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and grassroot-level workers who lead the field in bringing the message of population control to the people, especially in the rural areas, the lack of a long-term, well-defined population policy is a serious shortcoming and one which has to be remedied as early as possible.

It may be politically correct to view all attempts at family planning as an assault on democratic rights. But unless efforts are made to implement a multi-pronged strategy which attacks female illiteracy, infant and maternal mortality and malnutrition on a war-footing in the larger fight for population control, the battle to ensure a better quality of life for the people of this country may well be lost.