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INDIA
Restrictions on large families
State enacts controls, while the federal gov’t opposes the idea
According to the new Population Stabilization Policy of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, starting next year, families giving birth to a third child will be ineligible for government jobs, and such families will also be excluded from government welfare schemes.
The rural Madhya Pradesh state—with a high population growth rate of over two percent per year—has already enacted legislation banning parents from holding elected offices in village councils and other bodies if a third child is born in the family after next January 26—Republic Day in India.
Western Maharashtra state government also announced several measures to penalize families with more than two children. One of the measures is a ban on registering the names of more than two children on the “Ration Card” starting May 2001. The amount of food items poor families could purchase at subsidized rates from Ration Shops has been fixed so far according to the number of family members. However, under the new measures, large families will have to be content with the same quota as smaller families with two children.
Meanwhile, two prominent Hindu priests, Swami Ramsukhdasji and Achayra Dharmendraji, have condemned population control measures, pointing out that “immorality and unlimited lust led to family planning procedures, and not any desire to check population growth.”
Describing abortion as “a sin worse than murder,” the prominent Hindu priests said that 90 percent of the abortions in India involved female feticide—a practice deep-rooted in Hindu preference for boys. The people and the government have failed to recognize the “evil consequences” of abortion on the crime situation in the country, lamented the Hindu leaders.
Despite the state’s new policy, the federal government has ruled out adopting coercive measures to rein in explosive population growth.
“Coercive methods do not achieve much in the long run,” federal health minister C.P. Thakur told the Parliament, rejecting calls from the population control lobby for harsh measures like penalizing and denying government welfare schemes to families with more than two children.
Recalling that coercive measures like forced sterilization adopted during the 1975-77 national emergency to control population growth only backfired, the health minister said the solution to a burgeoning population lay in sensitizing people to the need to have small families.
The health minister’s statement on population control was in tune with the new population policy that the federal government announced in February which aims to curb the population explosion by promoting small families through “promotional and motivational measures.”
The recommendations in a private bill introduced in Parliament—private bills are seldom even voted upon in Parliament—outlined the demands of the population control lobby for drastic measures to control “unmanageable population growth.” The bill proposes “disincentives,” like denial of voting rights, health care, housing loans, government jobs, and even admission to government-run educational institutions to families with more than two children.
“The Church does see the problem of runaway population growth in India. Curbing this should be done through educating and making people aware of the need to have smaller families. It should never be done by coercive measures against the exercise of the freedom of families to have children,” said Father Dominic Emmanuel, public relations secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India. Since the government measure targets the ration plan for poor families, the spokesman said, it amounts “to punishing the poor for their poverty.”
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