THE DEBATE ABOUT POPULATION CONTROL

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THE CONTEXT: Recently, the Uttar Pradesh State Law Commission has released a draft of a population control Bill which promotes a two-child policy, violation of which would mean people will be debarred from contesting local body elections, applying to government jobs, or receiving any government subsidy. Earlier in 2016 and 2019, a few private member bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha (and are being planned in the coming monsoon session too) regarding population control. Further, according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimates, India’s population will reach 1.5 billion by 2030 and hit 1.64 billion in 2050 while China’s population will reach 1.46 billion by 2030. These developments have generated a debate on various facets of population growth and the need for controlling it. This article examines this issue in a comprehensive manner and thus enables the aspirants to formulate a clear perspective.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: VIEWS OF PROMINENT THINKERS ON POPULATION

Many of the ancient philosophers like Confucius, Kautilya, Plato, and modem thinkers like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and others have deliberated on population issues. For instance, Kautilya, had written in his Arthashastra that ‘a large population is a source of the political, economic and military strength of a nation. The Chinese philosopher, Confucius argued that a numerical balance be maintained between population and environment. Thus, he was not in favour of unchecked growth of population. In ancient Greece, Plato advocated an absolute limit of population. In the modern period, Malthus and Marx have written elaborately on the population dynamics but their views, however differed fundamentally.

MALTHUSIAN VIEWS:

• In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Malthus argued that because of the strong attraction of the two sexes, the population could increase by multiples, doubling every twenty-five years.
• He contended that the population would eventually grow so large that food production would be insufficient.
• Malthus’s famous statement is ‘Population grows in a geometrical progression and subsis­tence increases only in an arithmetical progression.
• Malthus referred to two classes of checks which kept the population down
• Positive Checks: He spoke of famine, disease, war, pestilence, etc (Related to Mortality)
• Negative Checks: artificial means of birth control, late marriage, moral restraint, and chastity(Related to Fertility)
• He contended that without such restraints the world would face widespread hunger, poverty, and misery
• Malthus saw the tension between population and resources as a major cause of the misery of much of humanity.

MARXIAN VIEWS:

• According to Marx, the widespread poverty and misery of the working-class people were due to the misconceived organi­zation of society.
• He argued that starvation was caused by the unequal distribution of wealth and its accumulation by capitalists.
• It has nothing to do with the population.
• The population is dependent on economic and social organization.
• The problems of overpopulation and limits to resources are inherent and inevitable features associated capitalist system of production.
• If people experience an increase in their income, they are likely to reduce their fertility rate instead of increasing it, as they see that new opportunities are available to their children (for example going to school)
•  Marx believes the low wages of the capitalist system do not give workers this incentive to decrease their fertility and the population growth further increases the labor supply and depresses wages.
• Thus, according to Marx, overpopulation is a normal characteristic of capitalism.

CAUSES OF POPULATION GROWTH IN INDIA

The rapidly increasing population of India is a result of prevailing high birth rates and a large decline in the death rate in our country. According to the World Bank data, the Crude Death Rate (per 1000 people) in India is 7.265 as of the year 2019. While the Crude Birth Rate stands at 17.664. The census data 2011 put these as 7.2 and 22.1 respectively.

CAUSES FOR HIGH BIRTH RATE:

• In India, marriage is not only universal but takes place at an early age. About 80 percent of girls are married during the most fertile period of 15 to 20 yrs. of age
• Poverty means poor people have to spend little on the upbringing of their children. Besides, the children supplement the family income by engaging themselves in some odd jobs at an early age.
• Lack of conscious family planning had also kept the birth rate in India very high.
• In India, religion plays a major role in large size families. Abrahamic faith largely supports the large family size. Even after so many girls in the family, the desire for one son prompts parents to continue with their child-producing activity.
• The infant mortality rate is very high in India due to hunger, malnutrition, and poor living conditions. So the fear of the early death of their infants encourages the parents to have more children.

CAUSES FOR DECLINE IN DEATH RATE:

• Epidemics such as plague, smallpox, TB, and malaria which at one time used to cause a toll of heavy deaths, now have been effectively controlled.
• The percentage of the population living in towns and cities went up from 26% in 1991 and 31.16%in 2011. Better health, hygiene, and sanitation facilities in the town are expected to have lowered the death rate.
• Literacy among women is progressing rapidly. Educated women bring up their children with utmost care. Working women enjoy better economic status and as such, they are healthier.
• Besides the famine of 1943, no other serious famine has occurred in this century. Although famine-like conditions emerged in 1987 in the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh yet these were effectively combated to cause any serious loss of life.
• Disaster Management has become part and parcel of the Indian governance process. Physical, Technological, and Human infrastructure have been created to prevent and mitigate the loss of lives from disaster.

CHALLENGES OF POPULATION GROWTH IN INDIA

1. The problem of Capital Formation: High birth rate and relatively high expectancy of life mean a large number of dependents in the total population. The burden of dependents reduces the capacity of the people to save. So the rate of capital formation falls.
2. Effect on Food Problem: Rapid rate of growth of population has been the root cause of food problem. Shortage of food grains obliges the under-developed countries to import food grains from abroad. So a large part of foreign exchange is spent on it.
3. The problem of Unemployment: Large size of population results in disguised unemployment in rural areas and open unemployment in urban areas
4. Poverty: Rising population increases poverty in India. People have to spend a large portion of their resources for bringing up their wards. Hence improvement in production technique becomes impossible. It means low productivity of labor.
5. Population and Social Problems: Population explosion gives rise to a number of social problems. It leads to the migration of people from rural areas to urban areas causing the growth of slum areas. People live in the most unhygienic and insanitary conditions.
6. More Pressure on Land: Due to rising population per capita availability of land goes on diminishing and the problem of sub-division and fragmentation of holdings goes on increasing
7. Impact on Maternity Welfare: In India, population explosion is the result of a high birth rate which reduces the health and welfare of women. Frequent pregnancy without having a gap is hazardous to the health of the mother and the child. This leads to a high death rate among women of reproductive age due to early marriage.

POPULATION CONTROL POLICIES IN INDIA: AN OVERVIEW

Population policy may be defined as deliberately constructed or modified institutional arrangements and/or specific programs through which governments seek to influence, directly or indirectly, demographic change. The population policy of the Government of India has passed through the following phases from time to time:

Pre-Independence Period: The British did not consider population growth as a problem. Their attitude towards birth control was one of indifference because they never wanted to interfere with the values, beliefs, customs, and traditions of Indians. That is why this phase is called the Period of Indifference.

The Period of Neutrality, 1947-51: The period following independence and before the beginning of the planning era was one of neutrality. The Government of India was busy with post-independence problems like rehabilitation of the people following the Partition, reorganization of the States, and Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir.

The Period of Experimentation, 1951-61: During the first decade (1951-61) of planned economic development, family planning as a method of population control was started as a government program in India. The National Family Planning Programme was launched in 1952 with the objective of “reducing the birth rate to stabilize the population at a level consistent with the requirement of the national economy”.

The Beginning of the population Control Policy 1961 to 2000: With the rapid growth of population in the 1961 Census by 21.5 percent, the Extension Approach to family planning was adopted which emphasized the adoption of an educational approach to family planning through Panchayat Samitis, Village Development Committees and other groups. The National Population Policy was announced in 1976 to mount “a direct assault on the problem of numbers. In the post-emergency period, the Janata Government announced a New Population Policy in 1977.

National Population Policy, 2000: National Population Policy (NPP) 2000: The immediate objective is to address the unmet needs for contraception, health care infrastructure health personnel, etc. The medium-term objective is to bring the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to replacement level by 2010. The long-term objective is to achieve a stable population by 2045. The Central Government has set up a National Commission on Population (NCP) in 2000 to review, monitor, and guide NPP implementation. It is presided over by the Prime Minister with CMs of states and others as members.

IS POPULATION REALLY EXPLODING?

• During Independence, India was still one of the most populous countries with 350 million people. Since then, the country’s population has quadrupled, with 1.37 billion people in 2019.
• Population scientists have postulated a threshold to the number of births to keep the population under control. This is expressed as the total fertility rate (TFR), which is the average number of children a woman of childbearing age must-have. Population above TFR means growth, while that below TFR means decline. At TFR, the population is maintained.
• For humans, a 2.1 TFR would keep the country’s population stable. The number accounts for one child per mother, one per father, and an extra 0.1 for children who die in infancy and women who die before childbearing age.
• India is very close to this point now, as many states have, in fact, TFR below 2.1. This means India’s population is about to hit the replacement level. Or, there will be no effective population growth. India’s official data suggests this.
• The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-4, conducted in 2015-16, found India’s TFR had reached 2.2. Most Indian states had already achieved or were below 2.1 TFR. According to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS V 2020), the total fertility rate across most Indian states declined in the past half a decade. In 19 of the 22 surveyed states, TFRs were found to be ‘below-replacement’
• The highly populated states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh acted as outliers in otherwise steadily homogenizing fertility levels across states; they too, however, witnessed a decline from their 2005-06 levels.
• Bihar’s TFR decreased significantly (by 0.4) in the last five years, while information for Uttar Pradesh was not collected in the first phase of the latest round of the survey. Bihar’s TFR was 4 while that of Uttar Pradesh was 3.8 in 2005-06 (NFHS-3).
• Darrell Bricker, an author of the book Empty Planet that predicted an unprecedented global decline in fertility, also says: “India’s TFR has already reached replacement rate.”
• The Economic Survey 2018-19 tabled in Parliament and with a chapter on population, says, “India is set to witness a sharp slowdown in population growth in the next two decades.”
• According to it, the population in the 0-19 age bracket has already peaked due to a sharp decline in TFR across the country.
• The Economic Survey, in fact, suggested massive reorientation of public infrastructure like schools to prepare for less population.
• Estimates based on Census data predict that India will reach a TFR of 2.1 by 2021. When multiple data sources can agree that India’s population growth has shown a declining trend for quite some time now, demographers and sociologists argue that we need not worry about population explosion

WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AND POPULATION CONTROL

There are many unintended consequences of India’s family planning policy and programs heavily impacting the rights of women. The various dynamics of this issue are outlined below.

PATRIARCHAL ATTITUDE: Gender norms in our patriarchal society dictate economic responsibilities to men and reproductive responsibilities to women. This is reflected in how family planning measures are used in India: heavily skewed towards female sterilization.

GENDER IMBALANCE: In 2015, of all married people in the reproductive age group, only 47.8% used any modern method of contraception (NFHS 4). Among the people who used contraception, 88% were women – 75% women underwent female sterilization – whereas, of the 12% male contraceptive users, only 0.6% underwent male sterilization.

MISSING MALE SEGMENT: The efforts for population control has mostly translated to controlling women’s, and not men’s, fertility. The program is designed to cater only to women and doesn’t actively engage with men to increase their participation in sharing the burden of family planning. The National Health Policy 2017, released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, aims to increase the uptake of male sterilization to up to 30% but offers no roadmap to implement it nor to tackle gendered challenges that persist in the health system.

ADMINISTRATIVE/POLICY FLAW: According to the National Health Mission Financial Management Report 2016-17, the total expenditure on family planning in 2016-17 was Rs 577 crore, of which 85% was spent on female sterilization alone, and only 2.8% on male sterilization.

VIOLATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS: The incident in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, in November 2014 highlighted how women from lower socioeconomic groups were sterilized in a camp without proper infection control, leading to severe complications in many women and the death of 15. The Supreme Court of India has highlighted that 363 women, largely from rural and marginalized communities, died between 2010 and 2013 during or after surgery in sterilization camps, and ordered the government to shut these camps down.

CONDITIONS BASED ON POPULATION CONTROL NOT A GOOD IDEA?

• Empirical Study: A study by former Madhya Pradesh chief secretary Nirmala Buch on laws restricting the eligibility of people with more than two children in Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Rajasthan concluded that the two-child norm violates the democratic and reproductive rights of individuals. A high number of women (41 percent) among our respondents faced disqualification for violating the two-child norm. Among Dalit respondents, this proportion was even higher (50 percent),” Buch’s study finds.
• NHRC observations: The incentives/disincentives approach has been denounced in the past by the National Human Rights Commission after such measures were introduced by several States in the 1990s and 2000s, i.e., Haryana, undivided Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha.
• Wrong Policy Focus: India is on the path to stabilizing its population. Therefore, the stress on the introduction of punitive measures to ensure population control is misplaced. In fact, a few states that imposed restrictions in various forms to enforce the two-child norm are on the back foot now. Four of the 12 states which introduced the two-child norm have already revoked it
• Exclusion of the poor: Poverty is a major reason for the poorer sections having a larger number of children. By putting conditions like limiting government benefits and participation in electoral democracy to persons having not more than two children, the poor becomes both economically and politically excluded.
• International Experience: After China revised its two-child policy recently, the Population Foundation of India issued a statement saying that India must learn from China’s failed experience with enforcing coercive population policies. It said religion has little to do with fertility levels but what makes the difference is “education, employment opportunities and accessibility of contraceptives”.
• Population Momentum: Despite a decline in fertility, the population keeps growing. Demographers call this the “population momentum”. It is important to understand that even if all the couples in UP were to have two children from tomorrow, the population will continue to grow. This is because of the large number of young people in the state. Unlike in the past, the population is growing not because couples have more children, but because we have more young.

WHAT MUST BE DONE?

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM STATES: Kerala and Punjab have 1.6 TFR, while Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have 3.4 and 2.7 TFR respectively (NFHS 4). NFHS-4 data shows only 22.8 percent of women in Bihar attended school for 10 or more years in 2014-15. In neighboring Uttar Pradesh, the figure was 32.9 percent. In contrast, 72.2 percent of women in Kerala attended school for 10 or more years, while the figure was 55.1 percent in Punjab. So schooling plays a vital role In TFR. The proper implementation of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme can be a game-changer.

REDUCTION IN CHILD MARRIAGES: NFHS-4 data shows an increase in TFR in states with a high number of child marriages. So increasing the age of marriage can help reduce the TFR. Strict implementation of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 along with social persuasion and influence can help in this regard.

AVAILABILITY OF CONTRACEPTIVES: From 1998-99 to 2005-06, TFR declined from 2.9 to 2.7. During this period, the country witnessed a change in social mindset. The use of contraceptives increased by 13.3 percent. Studies by the Population Foundation of India point out the lack of availability of contraceptives both for men and women. Thus reliable access to contraceptives through ASHA workers at the local level need to be ensured.

CHECK UNPLANNED PREGNANCIES: Devendra Kothari, former professor at the Indian Institute of Health Management Research University, Jaipurattributes India’s current population growth to unplanned pregnancies. Based on NFHS 1 to 4, it is estimated that 135 million out of 430 million births were the result of unplanned pregnancies. So proper planning and spacing pregnancies are required.

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT: According to the NFHS-4 data, the women in the lowest wealth quintile, and the least educated women, had on average one more child than those with more than 12 years of schooling and in the highest wealth quintile. Thus holistic women empowerment through instruments like “Gender Budgeting” and schemes like Stand Up India, Promotion of SHGs by National Livelihood Missions must be implemented earnestly.

ADHERENCE TO CAIRO CONSENSUS: The Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, of which India is a party (The Cairo Consensus)  has called for the promotion of reproductive rights, empowering women, universal education, maternal and infant health to untangle the knotty issue of poverty and high fertility.

THE WAY FORWARD

• China’s example of a distorted demography (age-sex composition of the population) is a warning against a counter-productive population control bill. Public health matters shouldn’t be coercive in nature.
• When reproduction is controlled or forced, there is a distortion in the working population and the elder dependent population, which can lead to possibly disastrous economic consequences.
• In the case of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh too, a decentralized implementation of family planning policy can bring about a gigantic change and a population control policy will do more harm than good.
• We need to invest heavily in human capital, health, and education for a healthy and productive population that can add to the national and global accomplishments of the country.

THE CONCLUSION: India is on course to achieve the TFR although state-wise disparity exists. Indira Gandhi has said that Development is the best contraceptive. Given the poor developmental and governance indicators of the Empowered Action Groups states (EAG), we can draw a clear causal relationship between high TFR and poor development. In the context of the current population debate, the Governments must not let “politics/elections decide the policies “but should frame them according to hard data. Population size or its growth per se is not the problem but the problem is the distribution of resources and opportunities equitably in the population. The focus should be on “family planning and resource equity” rather than on “population control and unequal wealth creation”.