The latest NFHS-5 shows a reduction in IMR and under-5 mortality rate in nearly all the 17 states surveyed. “It is also extremely important to space out births, mostly for the health of the mother. However, this is often not done; family planning counselling is crucial for couples planning a second child,” says Dr Manisha Singh, senior consultant, gynaecology and reproductive medicine at Fortis hospital in Bannerghatta, Bengaluru. Examples from countries such as Thailand and Bhutan show that providing more choices in birth control to women can help increase contraceptive prevalence rate significantly. Bhutan is an excellent example—the empowerment of women helped lower their TFR from 6.6 in the 1960s to 1.98 in 2018. “The lesson here is that when couples are offered a wide range of choices, they are more likely to use a contraceptive.
Study options
One place behind the world’s most populous city, China with 1.38 billion (The United Nations). Although the population has been a problem acknowledged by the government, it has been growing continuously, non-stop. India’s population is predicted to surpass China’s population by 2022.
Although some of the government’s enforcement methods were comparatively mild, such as providing contraceptives, millions of Chinese had to endure methods such as forced sterilizations and forced abortions. Long-term consequences of the policy included a substantially greater number of males than females in China and a shrinking workforce. I paused again, remembering the abandoned infant girls of Usilampatti who were picked up by nurses, midwives and relatives and sold to orphanages or to people who wanted babies. They were taken from hospitals, from homes, from midwives who had been asked to kill them. I remembered visiting the cradle baby outfit set up by Jayalalitha and wondering what would happen to the cute babies lying there in cradles.
Get the latest news and articles delivered to your inbox
Further, when couples and individuals have greater access to contraceptives early in their reproductive careers, there is a delay in the age of first childbirth and hence, a wider generation gap,” says Piccin. Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”. What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child. And in 2021, a senior government minister proposed a national “one-child” policy. By now, most national governments have policies designed to influence fertility in some way. Nearly every country has measures to reduce unintended and adolescent fertility.
Historically, most policies were designed to reduce fertility in order to slow population growth. More recently, many governments in low fertility countries are explicitly trying to boost fertility. In this chapter, I review fertility policies of the past—including the coercive sterilization programs in Southeast Asia and China’s One Child Policy—and policies motivated by eugenic ideas. I also consider fertility policies of the present, including those which try to boost fertility.
At least three children: Mohan Bhagwat
My analysis allows for an additional perspective into the dynamics of son preference in India. Using mixed-effects regression modeling, I allow for the likelihood to sex select to differ across communities. Some parents who have a daughter may choose to sex select during their next pregnancy, while some will not. Some parents with strong son preference are willing to undergo a sex-selective abortion, while others are not. Some medical professionals are willing to flaunt the national law against identifying fetal sex, while others are not.
- India spent more than $100 million on family planning in 2015 to 16, with some of these programs resulting in improvement.
- The worry here is that the coming population milestone will push India to adopt knee-jerk population policies.
- The memories which came flooding back to me were oppressive and distressing.
- Union Finance Minister Nirmal Sitharaman, in her interim budget speech in February this year, proposed a high-power committee to address the country’s rapid population growth.
Those who want only two children will be most likely to sex select at the second birth if they already have a daughter. In my analysis, I account for desired family size and thus variation in the intensity of the fertility squeeze throughout India. Controlling also for typical factors such as religion, age, education levels and socioeconomic status, I demonstrate that the best predictor of whether a subsequent birth is male is the sex composition of the children previously born. It is clear that sex selection continues in the most gender-skewed Northwest but at increasingly earlier parities, expanding from third births during the 1990s to second births in the 2000s. I find evidence of sex selection in the rest of the country emerging in recent years.
When Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath chose the occasion of World Population Day on July 11 to announce a new state population policy, there normally should have been no quarrel about it. After all, the state is India’s most populous, harbouring nearly 200 million people (as per Census 2011) or 17 per cent of India’s population. If it were to become a nation, Uttar Pradesh would have the fifth largest population in the world. China introduced its one-child policy in 1979 over concerns that the population was increasing at a very fast rate. But the policy has brought its own set of challenges to one of the world’s biggest economies, which has had a declining youth population for years while the proportion of the population over age 65 has risen from about 4% to almost 10%. India has been grappling with population control for decades, which has resulted in abject poverty, with government welfare programmes unable to cater to thousands of people earning less than $3 per day.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, infant mortality dropped significantly. The “one-child policy”—limiting births per couple through coercive measures—was implemented in the early 1980s, and fertility dropped dramatically. Both countries are struggling with the legacy of harsh population policies, and stricter population controls in India could have disastrous consequences for women and minority communities. Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s government in Telangana is thinking of returning to the old policy, which was changed in the 1990s by the government of undivided Andhra Pradesh, a report by news agency PTI said. The two-children norm was repealed for urban local bodies in Telangana earlier. China’s one-child policy was controversial because it was a radical intervention by government in the reproductive lives of citizens, because of how it was enforced, and because of some one child policy in india of its consequences.
Leave a Reply