The Right Pill

In '47, our population was 350 million. Today, it's almost three times that. We're adding around 18 million people a year, people who've to be housed, fed and educated. Except for the past decade, our economic growth rate has averaged a miserable 3 to 4 per cent a year, of which over 2 per cent has been taken up by the increase in numbers of people.

This the reason why we remain one of the world's most backward countries, a third of our population below the poverty line and 400 million who can't read or write. The late J.R.D. Tata, one of the few visionary industrialists India's had, tried to stress the urgency of the problem on Jawaharlal Nehru, who pooh-poohed his concern, believing that numbers were a source of strength. China's Mao, along with most leaders of the developing world, thought likewise. They were wrong. Fortunately, their successors realised their mistake. We did not.

The only vigorous attempt at controlling numbers in India took place during Indira Gandhi's infamous Emergency. A complete disaster, it left most Indian governments scared enough to change family planning to family welfare.

A few years back, I researched and wrote a book on the developing countries which had succeeded in family planning programmes. Only countries with a voluntary programme were included, which is why China was not. While political will and political commitment were important, two elements stood out and were common in all the cases studied: literacy, particularly female literacy, and healthcare.

Sadly, our population policymakers have lurched from one gimmick to another, from free transistor sets for sterilisation operations, to barring politicians with more than two children from contesting elections (never mind if P.V. Narasimha Rao has five and Laloo Prasad Yadav seven!) The essentials,higher literacy and good healthcare,have been ignored.

Take for instance Indonesia, an almost entirely Muslim country. When it got its independence, it had a literacy rate of just 12 per cent (ours was 22 per cent). Its life expectancy rate,the best indication of healthcare,was far below the 39 years for India. In the '70s, soon after Gen Suharto took over, the country got a financial bonanza of several billion dollars extra revenue from higher oil prices. What shall I do with this money? he asked his young advisors. Put it straight into primary education healthcare and family planning, they told him. Which he did. Today, Indonesia's literacy rate is over 80 per cent (ours is 62 per cent) and life expectancy, close to 75 years (ours is 63).

When people say, Muslims are to blame, they don't accept family planning, I point to Indonesia and Tunisia, another Islamic country that's been a success story. And when they say, Muslims are increasing faster than Hindus in India, I point to how Muslims in Kerala have a far lower rate of population growth than Hindus in UP or Bihar. There's also Goa, 40 per cent of which is Catholic, which has joined Kerala. So, it's not a question of religion, only education.

Apart from greater investment in literacy and healthcare, the government also needs to make it easier for ngos with a good record in the population field to operate in India and make widely available a large variety of good-quality, affordable contraceptives. Finally, it needs to go beyond the one archaic method of family planning in India,female sterilisation. India needs to provide its population a greater choice of safe methods. Unfortunately, some feminist groups have been opposing some of these methods on ideological, rather than health, grounds. And, even more unfortunately, the government has succumbed to them.

There are no easy short-cuts. Indira Gandhi liked to say: Development is the best contraceptive. Unfortunately, India got neither development nor contraceptives. It needs both.

(Rahul Singh, a former consultant for UNFPA, has written Family Planning Success Stories: Asia, Latin America, Africa.)