Population Foundation of India: Plowing a lonely furrow in family planning

Despite birth control becoming a taboo subject in Indian politics and the public discourse after the excesses of the Emergency (1975-77), for the past 48 years the Delhi-based PFI has been actively propagating and devising plans and strategies to decelerate India’s population growth momentum – Dilip Thakore & Indranil Banerjie Birth control or family planning — it’s politically more acceptable euphemism — are words that have almost disappeared from the public discourse in 21st century India. Neither the country’s self-serving politicians, nor its effete intelligentsia seem ready to acknowledge that public infrastructure and services such as health, education, social security schemes etc, have failed to cope with population growth. Despite the cosmetic efforts of successive governments at the Centre and in the states for the past seven decades, Census 2011 reported a decadal population growth rate of 17.65 percent. Although the grandly titled Union ministry of health and family welfare issues periodic statements to the effect that the country is moving towards population stabilisation, i.e, the number of children per parental couple is moving towards two, the plain unvarnished truth is that for the past seven decades, the country’s population growth has averaged an exponential (compounded) 2.02 percent per year. Consequently, the national population which was 360 million in 1951 shortly after India wrested its independence from foreign (British) rule and adopted Soviet-style central planning as its socio-economic development model, has tripled to 1.21 billion according to Census 2011. Therefore, despite its massive subcontinental size (3.28 million sq. km), the country which covers 2.4 percent of the world’s land area, is experiencing a huge challenge in supporting 18 percent of the world’s population.  Indeed, the truth is that the country’s resources although vast, are unable to cope with this runaway growth in the number of citizens, a situation exacerbated by post-independence India’s adoption of the Soviet-inspired public sector-led socialist economic development model, which has frittered away the national savings and other resources. Moreover, within the placid groves of the academy and woolly-headed intelligentsia (including the media), there’s hardly any meaningful discussion on ways and means to control the country’s explosion of numbers which reportedly adds the equivalent of one Australia (pop.19 million) to the population of a nation in which the average per capita income is a pathetic $1,710 per year, compared with $57,638 in the US, $8,124 in China and $3,570 in Indonesia.  Historians and sociologists attribute conspicuous political and establishment silence on this critical issue severely hindering the national development effort, to the ham-fisted extra-constitutional intervention of Sanjay Gandhi (1946-1980) in the country’s official family planning programme — reportedly the first worldwide — during the infamous internal Emergency (1975-77). Proclaimed by then Congress party leader and prime minister Indira Gandhi, the Emergency was a dark period in India’s history when leaders of all opposition parties were imprisoned, nationwide media censorship was imposed and Part III of the Constitution which enshrines the fundamental rights, was suspended by the government.  During this 19-month period, Sanjay Gandhi and lumpen elements who…