With the decrease in population, competition among citizens was lowered and unemployment was alleviated (Potts). In rural China, it was the strictly enforced one-child policy which made the Chinese kill or abandon their infant girls because they wanted that one son. In pockets of rural India, it was the same hunger for sons combined with poverty and inability to sustain large families which spelt doom for the baby girls.
Effects of the OCP on fertility and
- Worse, the NFHS-4 data reveals that not even half of the women who avail family planning counselling are informed of other options beyond irreversible methods such as sterilisation.
- The decline in population growth rates for Jains (20.5 per cent), Buddhists (16.7 per cent), Sikhs (8.5 per cent) and Christians (7 per cent) was even more steep during the same period.
- Those who want only two children will be most likely to sex select at the second birth if they already have a daughter.
- Bhutan is an excellent example—the empowerment of women helped lower their TFR from 6.6 in the 1960s to 1.98 in 2018.
- With sex selection occurring at increasingly earlier births, and emerging more clearly in the Southeast, India’s sex ratio transition is not yet on a clear path to re-balance.
- The situation gets compounded when such norms are introduced without factoring in socioeconomic indicators.
Most economists aver that women’s participation in the labour force plays a crucial role in reducing their fertility rates. The share of women’s participation at work in India was an abysmal 36 per cent in 2021, compared to 64 per cent by men. Worse, instead of increasing in the past decade, it has shown signs of declining. The situation gets compounded when such norms are introduced without factoring in socioeconomic indicators.
I also remembered a distraught pregnant woman telling me she would never “give the baby to a government home” because who knew what would happen to her ten years down the line. I remembered the large group of teenage girls found in a dingy missionary-run hostel in Trichy recently. Girls from Usilampatti who had been discarded by their parents as infants and who had been “rescued” by the missionary more than 15 years ago only to be kept confined in that hostel and used for proselytizing and working on his farms. While the size of the working-age population will decline in 11 out of 22 major states, it will continue to rise in states such as Bihar, UP, MP and Rajasthan.
The VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad) has warned the state government that any population control measure should keep in mind the fact that Hindu dominance must remain intact in the country. China’s failure is being taken as a lesson by countries such as India, where development is instead being seen as the key to capping population growth. The policy also had worrying consequences for the gender balance as a desire for male children led to reported abortions and infanticide to ensure a couple’s only child was a boy.
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Short-term electoral gains are the last thing that should dictate any approach to population control. Experts have always questioned the efficacy of a punitive approach to population control. According to PFI, a strict limit on the number of children like the two-child norm will unleash a rapid increase in sex-specific abortions and divorce. In her 2006 book, The Law of Two Child Norm in Panchayats, Nirmala Buch, a former chief secretary of MP, documented how the two-child law in various states led to a rise in sex-selective and unsafe abortions. Men divorced their wives to run for local body polls and families gave up children for adoption to avoid disqualification. In 1952, India became the first country in the world to have a National Programme for Family Planning, which was last amended in 2000.
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Condom usage in India remains extremely low at 5.6 per cent of the population. “To reach our gender and health goals, we must focus on men and boys and encourage an open and inclusive dialogue on sexual and reproductive health,” says Dr S.K. Sikdar, advisor, maternal health and family planning, MOHFW. Encouragingly, there has been a significant drop in birth rates among all religious groups, including Muslims. The decline in population growth rates for Jains (20.5 per cent), Buddhists (16.7 per cent), Sikhs (8.5 per cent) and Christians (7 per cent) was even steeper during the same period. Population control can help reduce carbon emission in India and help alleviate climate change. Carbon emission means the carbon dioxide emission due to certain human activities.
At least three children: Mohan Bhagwat
The key is striking the right balance between population control and keeping one child policy in india the pace of economic growth. India’s fertility rate has dropped to 2.3 births per woman in 2016, compared to 3.2 births per woman in 2000, according to government data. But the booming population has been raising concerns for decades due to a rising poverty, decline in jobs and a poor literacy rate.
