THE BUSINESS OF AVOIDING BABIES

Population control is ensconced in ideology, technology, industry and, of course, health, but at the cost of women's well-being

Bela Malik Delhi

The billion mark of a fecund nation worries arithmeticians who simply divide India's national income by its population and yearn for a total fertility rate (TFR) down to a replacement level of 2.1. India's obsession with population control has traversed coercive birth control, family welfare, and now embraced "reproductive and child birth" that ostensibly empowers women by providing them with a menu of contraceptive products.

To dispel any doubt about the bottom line, a two-child norm was introduced for participation in panchayati raj institutions by an amendment to the decade-old Panchayati Raj Act. The UPA government, in its national common minimum programme, declared war on high fertility in some districts, creating a conductive atmosphere for non-informed consent to controversial women's contraception by NGOs, private players and other interested agents (DKT International-India, presenting what it calls "alternative business model for family planning", is active in Bihar). The National Population Policy (2000) maintained that India has 1 billion (100 crore) people, ie, 16 percent of the world's population on 2.4 percent of the global land area, and if this trend continues, then resource endowment and environment are likely to suffer. A stable population remains the goal. The policy document points out that females in India tend to reproduce "too early, too frequent, too many".

Causal connections established between population and poverty found easy route from the mighty alarmists in the North (encirclement, extinction, immigration concerns, arising from differential fertility rates as between the global North and South) to India. Mohan Rao, public health academic, in a scathing critique of this Malthusian perspective, pointed out that that these proponents will not say that a household is poor because it has little control over productive resources. What they say is that it is poor because, relative to the resources it owns, it has too many people. Ample research has been brought to bear against demography zealots to point to lack of sufficient cause-and-effect relationship between a growing population, on the one hand, and economic development or the environment, on the other.

Despite the evidence mounted against neo-Malthusians and the opposition of women in the health movement, the emphasis on population stabilisation rests less on total health and more on contraceptives. There is a touching belief in the ability of reduced births to bring about revolutionary changes in the bulk of a nation's population. Efforts to induce a demographic transition through birth reduction require intervention. Apart from 'awareness' (brainwashing school children through textbooks and media campaigns), abortions and sterilisations, the goodies roll out: injectables, vaccines, patches, emergency contraception, spermatocides, implants, pills and others (condoms, vaginal rings and intrauterine devices).

Birth control fundamentalists are obviously comfortable with a war against birth rates. Ashis Bose, founder-member of the Indian Association for the Study of Population, is in print saying, "The main reason for the success of the Indonesian model is the excellent military-style logistic in naming the programme. In India, we have an overdose of democracy." (Financial Express, January 4, 1994)