Lamentations on the Billionth Baby

The arrival of the billionth baby in India has been greeted with the expected responses. International financial institutions, NGOs, the Indian Government and assorted political parties have seen this as an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment towards population control. The, parrot like, mouthing of platitudes regarding the dangers to the nation of a rapidly increasing population reminds one of an old adage — the more things change, the more they remain the same. India’s population control programme is arguably the oldest in the world — started shortly after India’s Independence. On the balance all it has to show are repeated lamentations on the programme’s inability to effectively reduce the rate of population growth in the country. It is a convenient ploy for the ruling classes and their vocal drum-beaters in the media — for in one stroke the bogey of population can be used to explain away all their failures in providing decent conditions of living to a majority of the Indian population.

Population Control Policies Do not Work

What the proponents of strong measures to control the country’s population refuse to acknowledge is that population control policies — as we view them — just do not work. Take the case of female sterilisation — the principal focus of population policy in India for a decade and a half since the late seventies. For all the money pumped into the programme, data shows that an overwhelming majority of women who undergo sterilisation are those who are past their reproductive lives, i.e. they were unlikely to have conceived any more children even if they had not undergone a sterilisation operation. Of course votaries of the Family Planning programme have a convenient contradictory response to such criticisms. On one hand they would point out the successes of the programme — assorted statistics to show that the programme has actually helped in reducing birth rate, and that in the programme’s absence India’s population would have been much higher. In the same breath they would also argue that birth rates and population growth rates are still unacceptably high, and hence the population policy should be further strengthened!

Kerala’s Experience

Let us first examine the evidence regarding the programme’s “success” in the last four decades. What do we make of the limited success we have achieved in terms of declining birth rates in the country in the last three or four decades Everybody would like to talk about Kerala as a success story in containing population growth rate. What few, however, are prepared to say is that Kerala never had a very strong population policy. On the contrary states like Haryana (with one of the highest birth rates in the country) have received several national awards for having successfully implementing population programmes. When population policy theorists talk of Kerala, where the low birth rates approximate those of highly developed countries, they seldom (if ever) point out that Kerala was the first state (and still only one of three, including W.Bengal and Tripura) to initiate radical land reform programmes in 1957 under the first left led government in the country. Kerala’s fall in birth rates followed a set of major socio-economic advances that led to fall in infant and child mortality rates, increase in literacy rates (crucially increase in women’s literacy rates), etc. The process in Kerala was not duplicated in other parts of the country’s because of the kind of socio-economic policies that were followed by the Indian government. Yet, some advances were made in most states. These advances were, in part a result of the needs of the ruling classes (viz. an increase in education and health infrastructure) and in significant measure wrested from the ruling classes by numerous struggles of the working people in the country. Whatever the genesis, these advances, while not matching the needs of India’s working people, have led to demonstrable gains in some areas. Thus life expectancy has almost doubled since Independence, infant and child mortality rates have been halved, and literacy rates have increased significantly. There is no evidence that shows that slowing down of population growth rate in the country has been because of the population policy. In fact Kerala’s story would indicate that it has happened in spite of our population policies. Even in the rest of the country, the limited success in containing population can arguably be linked to the limited development in different socio-economic spheres.

Natural History of Population Change

It is important to understand that India’s experience regarding population growth is, by no means, unique. All over the globe population increased as a response to economic development. This is most clearly demonstrable under Capitalism, where major rise in population was seen after the Industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century. Much of this growth was first seen in Europe, the seat of Capitalism as well as that of the concomitant economic development in that period. There are many reasons why this happens. To start with economic development leads to greater availability of food, which in turn leads to higher survival rates. Gradually improved conditions of housing, other civic amenities, improvements in public health infrastructure, education, etc. leads to declining death rates. These conditions also facilitate increase in birth rates — better nutrition enhances the ability of women to bear children, and higher survival rates mean that there are more women who survive through the child bearing age. A combination of high birth rates and high survival rates, thus, provide a dual push to population growth rates. We can thus see a peaking of population growth rates in Europe in the first part of the Twentieth Century. Let us not forget that England is still twice as densely populated as India, even today.

The fall in birth rates starts somewhere in the middle of this process of increasing growth rates of population. This happens because the fall in birth rates, initially, is still much slower than the fall in death rates. So, even though less children are born, the population still continues to increase as even less people die. It takes much longer for birth rates to fall to a level where they compensate for the very low death rates. We can see this happening in the developed Capitalist world — Europe, N.America, Japan, etc. — only in the second half of the twentieth century. Decline in birth rates are predicated on a complex set of factors. Crucial to this is child survival rates. In situations where child survival rates are very low, birth rates are high because families produce more children as an “insurance” that at least a few of them will survive upto adulthood. The second crucial factor is related to women’s position in society and the economy. The old feudal values, where women are seen as just “home-makers” ensure that child rearing remains a full-time occupation for women in the child bearing age. Improved nutrition ensures that the span during which women can produce children increases significantly. Thus women, for 20-25 years move from one pregnancy to the next through much of this period. This cycle is dented only when women start entering the job market to take up independent careers, and are not seen as mere “tubes for producing babies”. The cycle is further dented when women are able to independently articulate the need to limit families, as repeated child-births (and early child-birth) take a toll on their health. Moreover, in developed Capitalist societies, the frenetic pursuit of material comforts act as a brake on family size — as a large family compromises access to an array of consumer goods. A combination of these factors has led to precipitate falls in birth rates in much of the developed world, and we see a reverse of the earlier process — birth rates dipping below the low death rates, leading to an actual fall in population.

Passing on the Burden of Guilt

What has been recounted above can be termed as the “natural history” of the dynamics of population change. India is in the kind of situation where Europe was in the first part of the twentieth century — high birth rates and declining death rates leading to an aggregate growth in population. Many of the factors that promote high birth rates — high infant and child mortality, gender discrimination, etc. — are still prevalent in significant measure in most parts of the country. Of particular significance is the severity of gender discrimination, and consequent preference for male children, still prevalent in India. A population policy which does not address these determinants of high birth rates cannot hope to succeed. If we critically examine the so-called successes of the population policy in this country, it should be evident that these have taken place not because of the population policies pursued in India, but because of limited progress made in social and economic development — however halting, inadequate and iniquitous they may have been. So the prescription should be one of rejecting the present paradigm that determines population policies in the country, and not one of further strengthening such policies.

When international “development” agencies, foreign funded NGOs and assorted socialites and celebrities speak tearfully of the poor Indians who need to adopt family planning, they essentially seek to pass on the burden of the effects of undiminished exploitation by their own class onto millions of poor Indians. India’s population continues to rise because a majority of Indians are poor, denied of basic health and education facilities, and without sustainable forms of employment. We do not need a population policy that targets the poor, and especially women amongst them. The poor in this country need access to methods by which they can limit their families. But for them to be able to do so they need a much larger set of enabling conditions. To deny them these conditions and simultaneously to seek to pass on the burden of guilt for India’s slow pace of development amounts to making a mockery of their present pathetic conditions of living.