If it’s working, don’t fix it, say the wise. Becoming the most populous country in the world may give the impression of India’s approach towards population stabilisation has gone awry, or that India needs population ‘control’ policies to stabilise the population. Nothing could be farther from the truth. According to the National Family Health Survey (2019-21), India has achieved replacement level fertility of 2.1, indicating that on average, women of reproductive age group have two children. It also indicates that India has commenced the process of stabilising its population by using development as the key input. It has not given into voices asking for “control”, a euphemism for coercion.
It may be worthwhile to review the experience of a country that chose an unsustainable path. China invoked the one-child norm to limit family sizes in the 1970s. Although the country had been investing in infrastructure, health services, and overall well-being of its people, it wanted a quicker route to a stable population and took this extreme step in 1979. This policy was enforced for three decades.
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Control-centric measures have disastrous fall-outs, particularly on sex ratio and the ageing patterns. China has ended up as a country with one of the most adverse sex ratios in the world—it has 1,123 males for every 1,000 females. Son preference is believed to have fueled the desire to get couples to have a son as their only child. In its zeal to fix the birth rate, China has clearly gone overboard. China’s TFR in 2020 was 1.3, which is lower than the TFRs of the UK and the US, two developed countries with stable populations.
By implementing its control-centric policies, China has demonstrated what the world must never do. Women cannot be held ransom to fertility and population targets. UNFPA’s State of World Population 2023 report warns that the anxiety regarding population may distract the world from solving its real problems and deny women their right to bodily autonomy.
India and China may have many differences in terms of their race and culture, but patriarchy is common to both. In spite of campaigns and legislations which made prenatal diagnostic tests for sex determination illegal, sex ratio in India over the past three decades has improved marginally. India had 1,073 male births per 1,000 female births in 1991, which reached 1,093 in 2001; 1,095 in 2011, but has dipped to 1,079, according to World Bank Gender Portal. The Economic survey 2017-18 underscored how son meta-preference has resulted in 21 million ‘unwanted girls’ in India between 0-25 age group.
China’s experience in population control should deter every country in the world to abandon the thought of imposing restrictive policies on its people. However, efforts have been made to induce control in India’s population policies, in the form of Private Members’ bills introduced in Parliament and state-specific population control policies which call for certain punitive measures against people with more than two living children, including disqualification from contesting elections and denial of benefits from government schemes.
The two-child norm adversely impacts women and girls with evidence highlighting instances of men deserting their wives to deny the proof of a third child in order to contest local body elections, children being given up for adoption, stark increase in sex-selective abortions and female foeticide. States such as Haryana and Punjab, which introduced two-child norm at the Panchayat level, have witnessed highly skewed sex ratios, further compromising the status of women in society.
These regressive measures seem to be out of place in a country where growth rate has slowed down and TFR has already reached replacement level. This has been achieved as a result of developmental efforts, including improved sexual and reproductive health and family planning services, secondary school education for girls, improved opportunities for women workers and breaking patriarchal norms. Any fertility differentials are on account of weak development outcomes around education, health, nutrition, employment, and empowerment of women. NFHS 5 shows that focused programmes such as Mission Parivar Vikas in high fertility districts have already begun delivering results.
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India is a democratic country where people have had the freedom to choose governments, not just methods of contraception. The government toyed with coercion briefly during Emergency, due to which men’s vasectomy as a method declined to negligible levels—around 0.2% of all methods. It would be detrimental to go down that path again.
India’s large 365 million young people are its greatest strength. Even as its population grows older as a result of demographic transition caused by reduced fertility, it would be naïve to interfere with the natural pace of population decline. Instead of being distracted with fruitless and untenable debates, India should invest in its young people and make them the assets they can be, so that they can make a significant contribution to its economy. This is not the time for India to “turn back and descend the stair”, as Eliot said in Prufrock and Other Observations, but to march ahead on the same path, accelerate investments in people, and make a robust transition to both a stable as well as a developed country.
The writer is executive director, Population Foundation of India