A draft bill on population control prepared by the Uttar Pradesh (UP) State Law Commission to promote the two-child policy has invoked strong reactions from several quarters. Recent population policies in India focus on the advancement of women economically, academically and socially, as independent women are more likely to have small families. The declining number of young people in China is also a growing economic concern. Over the last few years factories have reported youth-labour shortages and it’s likely to only get worse.
- And so we theorize on two possible kinds of aspirations that exceed the reach of even the educated, urban, middle class family in India and may influence fertility behavior.
- Whether an ageing China can be a rising China will be decided by the actions made by the government and their ability to adapt to the new situation.
- Expenditure on children’s education is higher by 40% in one-child families than in families with three or more children; two-child families fall in between.
- With China’s dependency ratio rising and labour becoming costlier, the time is now ripe for India to capitalise on its demography.
- Nobody will have more children just because politicians are asking.
days Replacement
“Several States in southern India are encouraging women to have more children due to declining fertility rates. On the other hand, we have States such as Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan which have passed laws aimed at restricting access to government jobs, subsidies and the ability to contest local elections for individuals with more than two children. To have such divergent policies on population in one country is ridiculous,” Chandra said.
Also, in February 2020, a private member bill had been moved in the Rajya Sabha by Shiv Sena Member of Parliament Anil Desai seeking a constitutional amendment directing the government to offer incentives to only families with no more than two children. It also asked the court to direct the Law Commission of India to prepare a comprehensive report on “population explosion” and suggest ways to control it. For just about every problem that India faces today, population is regarded as the foremost cause. Three of the six services, viz., Immunization, Health check-up and Referral Services are related to health and are provided through NHM & Public Health Infrastructure. The Anganwadi Services is a universal self-selecting Scheme available to all the beneficiaries who enroll at the AWCs. The beneficiaries under this scheme are children in the age group of 0-6 years, pregnant women and lactating mothers.
However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle classes, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004–2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child.
Further, under Poshan 2.0, focus is on diet diversity, food fortification, leveraging traditional systems of knowledge and popularizing use of millets. Nutrition awareness strategies under Poshan 2.0 aim to develop sustainable health and well-being with focus on local, wholesome foods to bridge dietary gaps including deficit in the intake of micronutrients. Fortification of staple food items, including salt, is one of the strategies to address micronutrient deficiencies in addition to dietary diversification and micronutrient supplementation along with other measures like infection control, water and sanitation, etc. Therefore, in order to reduce the prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies including anaemia, emphasis is given on all the strategies through the Schemes/programmes implemented by the various Departments/ Ministries. These include iron and folic acid supplementation, calcium supplementation, Vitamin-A supplementation, use of fortified food items, etc.
Acknowledgement of Country
POSHAN Abhiyaan is the key pillar for Outreach and will cover innovations related to nutritional support, ICT interventions, Media Advocacy and Research, Community Outreach and Jan Andolan. At the same time, it is true that we cannot assume that this will always be the case. A demonstrated for Iran for example (Abbasi-Shavazi, Hosseini-Chavoshi, and McDonald 2007), declines in fertility can sometimes be accompanied by significant increases in the first birth interval; if that is also beginning to happen in India, we may be underestimating cohort fertility.
- In Rajasthan, those having more than two children are not eligible for appointments in government jobs.
- RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, at a press conference in New Delhi on August 28, while responding to questions on population control, said every Indian couple should try and have three children in the interest of the nation.
- It is not our intention to enter into the debate as to whether family size causes greater investments in children or vice versa (Cassen 1994; Johnson and Lee 1986).
- This suggests that as we look for the pathways to low fertility in societies with strong family ties, we may need to focus on parental aspirations for their children rather than for themselves.
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Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author Mei Fong covered Asia for many years as a Wall Street Journal correspondent and was recently named a Top 50 influencer on US-China relations by Foreign Policy magazine. Her first book, on China’s one-child policy, debuted in 2016 to critical acclaim from New York Times, Guardian, Independent, Ms., The Times of London and Telegraph. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-V reports a drop in India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to 2.0, signaling a potential for slowing population growth. However, our population policy should keep in mind the larger consequences of zero population growth.
In this paper we consistently show predicted values from multiple regression or logistic regression for outcomes of interest. These regressions control for woman’s age, education, place of residence, caste, household income and a dummy indicator for the state of residence. The results are predicted using STATA MARGINS command, holding all other variables at their mean value separately for urban and rural residents. NFHS-III documents that about half the women aged 40–44 have four or more children.
What will it take for China to arrest its declining birth rate?
Uttar Pradesh has seen a run of recent proposals for punitive two-child policies. Today, while there are some significant regional variations, India has a Total Fertility Rate (the metric used by researchers to measure family size) of just 2.0 – this is below the global average and below the “replacement rate” at which a population stabilises and no longer grows or shrinks. In 1952, five years after Independence, India became one of the first countries to initiate a national family planning programme. A decade later, this would become the largest government-sponsored family planning program in the world. Over the next two decades, with economic development falling short of expectations, more and more resources and attention were devoted to family planning.
Irreversible methods are for when a couple is done childbearing entirely. “Even if the ministry of health and family welfare (MoHFW) provides six different alternatives, most women aren’t informed of them,” says Debanjana Choudhuri, Asia advocacy and partnerships advisor, one child policy in india Foundation for Reproductive Health Services in India (FRHSI). So, of all the women who opt for birth control, a whopping 77 per cent go for sterilisation. The fear now is that the incentives for two children will drive more families to force their women to go for sterilisation, a procedure that can even be harmful to maternal health if done immediately after birthing.
Chaudhari points out that sterilisation is a popular choice for women because it involves just a single visit to the clinic. For an Intra Uterine Device (IUD), one must return in five years for a check-up. 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.
It contemplates making people with more than two children ineligible for local body and for government jobs. The proposal seeks to disentitle those already in service to promotions and exclude them from the benefits of 77 schemes. The government can provide some extra benefits to families having two daughters which will prevent people from aborting girl child screwing up the gender ratio. From January 2021, Assam will bar people from government jobs if they had more than two children, according to a decision by the state cabinet, The Times of India reported in October 2019. It is also likely that women would bear the brunt of a two-family norm, experts said. Over eight years to 2016, the use of condoms declined by 52% and vasectomies fell by 73% showing the reluctance among men to engage with birth control, as IndiaSpend reported in February 2017.
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. The worry here is that the coming population milestone will push India to adopt knee-jerk policies. As occurred at the height of China’s one-child policy, Indians co Both nations are battling with the tradition of extreme population policies, and more stringent population controls in India might have dreadful effects for ladies and minority neighborhoods. The concept the nation need to embrace something like China’s previous “one-child policy” has actually been moving from the fringe to the political mainstream.
It dropped from around 4.6 births per woman in 1979 to 1.5 births per woman in 2010. The rate seems very low, but the data was stretched by the low rate in South India. The fact is that in North India, the fertility rate is way over 5 births per woman, which is as high as the mean the African countries with the highest fertility (Roser).
Buch’s study found that the two-child norm for elected panchayat representatives runs counter to the objective of bringing women, weaker sections and younger members into these institutions. Shailaja Chandra, former Chief Secretary of Delhi and former Secretary, Ayurveda, Yoga, and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy), Union Health Ministry, said the Madhya Pradesh incident is an eye opener that coercive policies such as the two-child norm “are retrograde and must be repealed”. Under Madhya Pradesh civil service rules, a government employee is ineligible for their job if they have a third child born after January 26, 2001. The couple allegedly told the police they had succeeded in concealing their third child from getting documented but were afraid that if news of their fourth child became public, they would lose employment.
However, if the path to below replacement fertility could be shown to also be paved by familiar economic forces rather than cultural shifts, perhaps we may see India experiencing below replacement fertility in the near rather than distant future. In this paper, we attempt such a reevaluation by looking at the emergence of a subgroup of the Indian population that seems to exhibit very low fertility. To do this, we compare families at different parities, those with one, two, or more than two children.
Do these one child families in India represent what Livi Bacci (1973) called the ‘forerunners’ of fertility decline in the rest of the population? Such heterogeneity would be analogous to the heterogeneity of career and fertility preferences underlying average low TFRs in western countries today (Hakim, 2003). In the first category are the aspirations for oneself, that is, the parental or fertility decision-making unit. These are those material and non-material desires for personal advancement and fulfillment that are hampered by children.
