States in India Take New Steps to Limit Births

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ASNA, India (November 7, 2003) - A new reckoning is under way in

India over how best to stabilize a population that is set to surpass

China's as the world's biggest by midcentury.

 

Indian women currently bear an average of just under three children —

a steep drop from the six of 50 years ago, but still above the 2.1

that would stabilize a population that already exceeds a billion

people.

 

The burden on development and the growing competition for resources

like water and land are prompting a reassessment in which India is

struggling to balance its democratic impulses with its demographic

pressures.

 

Nearly a decade ago, India embraced the conclusions of a 1994 United

Nations conference on population in Cairo, which called for

abandoning contraceptive targets, improving education and health for

women and children, and offering multiple voluntary contraceptive

choices.

 

India itself had recoiled against coercive policies — like China's —

after the ruthless sterilization campaign under Indira Gandhi in the

late 1970's.

 

But today, the national mood increasingly favors a tougher approach,

and states, free to adopt their own policies, are experimenting.

 

At least six have laws mandating a two-child norm for members of

village councils, and some are extending it to civil servants as

well.

 

Some states have considered denying educational benefits to third

children. States are also increasingly turning to incentives — pay

raises, or access to land or housing — for government servants who

choose sterilization after one or two children.

 

Across some states in North India, local elected officials are

increasingly obliged to mount explicit defenses of their decisions to

procreate.

 

The reason: laws limiting members of village councils, or panchayats,

to two children, on the notion that they should provide models of

restraint.

 

Pardeshi Yadav, head of the Kayathpalli village council, recently

found himself defending the birth of his last child: The government-

provided condom he had used had failed, he said. This was not his

fault.

 

Ratan Lal Banjare, a member of the Basna local council, could not be

held responsible for his latest offspring, either, and he had a

doctor's note to prove it. His wife was not menstruating regularly.

Who knew, he argued, that she could get pregnant nonetheless?

 

Despite such arguments, a move is gaining steam to revive a national

bill limiting members of Parliament and state legislatures to two

children.

 

"Politicians should set an example," the minister of health and

family welfare, Sushma Swaraj, told The Hindu newspaper.

 

Many panchayat members agreed, saying the law would be more effective

and fairer — if still unfair in their particular cases — if it

extended up the political scale to those with real power.

 

But critics of the laws call them gimmicks. They point out that the

countries, and even Indian states, that have most successfully

limited population growth have done so more by increasing education

and work opportunities for women, improving health care and providing

a wide range of contraceptive choices.

 

As seen here, in Chhattisgarh State, the law also provides a case

study in the challenges, and perhaps the costs, of even mildly

coercive social engineering in a democracy.

 

The village councils reflect India's concerted effort to broaden the

democracy that its elites established at independence.

 

A 1992 constitutional amendment reserved one-third of council seats

for women. Each state also reserves a certain number for lower-caste

citizens, according to their proportion in the population.

 

Yet the two-child law is now unseating, or threatening to, some of

those who have gained access to power for the first time. Mr. Yadav

and Mr. Banjare, for example, are both members of lower castes.

 

"How can you crush the democratically elected people by these laws?"

asked Mr. Banjare, who, with his safari suit, mobile phone and

ambitions for higher office, typifies India's burgeoning young

political class.

 

In July, the Supreme Court seemed to suggest that India needed to do

a bit more crushing, when it upheld a two-child limit for village

council members in Haryana State. Population control was a matter of

such urgency, the court said, that the nation could not place "undue

stress on fundamental rights and individual liberty."

 

India is now home to 17 percent of the world's people on only 2.5

percent of its land, the court noted, saying the "torrential

increase" in population was hindering socioeconomic

progress. "Complacency in controlling population in the name of

democracy is too heavy a price to pay," the three-judge panel agreed.

 

In Chhattisgarh, with more than 20 million people, 40 percent of them

below the poverty line, the two-child norm went into effect in

January 2001. State officials could not provide figures on how many

panchayat members have faced dismissal since then, but several

districts reported more than 100 cases each.

 

Many cases involved women who benefited from the 1992 constitutional

amendment. Meenabai Rajaram took over from her husband as sarpanch,

or council chairwoman, in Khutari village when the seat was reserved

for a woman. She proudly recited some of her achievements: desilting

a pond, improving a road, building a community platform for functions.

 

Now she faces dismissal. The couple had six daughters when the law

went into effect. They wanted — and subsequently had — a son, a

desire that also drove three other panchayat members interviewed to

break the law. Some worry that strict enforcement of two-child laws

will lead to more abortions of female fetuses, already a problem in

North India.

 

"Everyone wants a small family — two children," explained her

husband, Rajaram Sonkar, as their girls flitted around his small

shop. "But if you have a daughter, you have to keep going."

 

Dev Lal Gajpal, whose wife, Dhaneshwari Sahu, faces unseating as head

of the Mangata village council because she bore a fourth child two

years ago, questioned the law's very premise.

 

"If I have leadership ability, but am the father of six children, why

shouldn't I lead?" he asked. "This norm will deprive the village and

even the country of future leaders."

 

He and others have found themselves publicly defending their decision

not to choose abortion. "We thought of abortion, but we are Hindus,"

Mr. Gajpal said. "There is the notion that if you go for abortion, it

is like murder."

 

His fourth child, he added, a 2-year-old girl who twirled off her

mother's hand nearby, was now his "most beloved."

 

Enforcement of the law has also been complicated by the shrewdness of

some citizens weaned in a democracy.

 

Political opponents have used the law to settle scores, informing on

rivals who had a child. Ratun Dau, who lives on the other side of

Khutari village from Meenabai Rajaram, told district officials about

her son.

 

"It's very important in India to control the population because

people are poor," he said, before confessing to baser motives toward

Ms. Rajaram's husband. "We are of different political factions, and

we didn't like his work," Mr. Dau said. "Here we got the opportunity,

so we attacked him."

 

Mr. Dau, it turns out, had seven children. He shrugged. He is older,

now 54, with his youngest child 18. "At the time there was no

awareness," he said.

 

That there is more awareness now is undeniable. Even Mr. Dau's

neighbor, Uttra Bai, a 17-year-old with a one-year-old son, said she

would prefer only two children.

 

But she also helps explain why so many women have more. Like tens of

millions of Indian women, especially across the northern Hindi belt,

Ms. Bai was never schooled. She was married off at 15, and had her

first child soon after. She said that she did not know how to prevent

a pregnancy, and that in any case, the number of children she would

bear was for her in-laws to decide.

 

Source: New York Times, "States in India Take New Steps to Limit

Births," by Amy Waldman

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/07/international/asia/07INDI.html?

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