Family Planning and Sustainable Development: Lessons Learnt from India’s Social Policy Plans

The link between sustainable development and population growth was first exposed by Thomas Robert Malthus, a British scholar and economist, who in his book "Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)" correlated uncontrolled population growth with scarcity of resources. Out of the two balancing processes in this regard; positive checks which include natural counters like war, famines and disease, and negative checks like delayed marriages and abstinence from sex, Family Planning is of the species of the latter set. In India, the need for Family Planning at a functional level was felt as early as in 1951 when the first draft of the First Five Year Plan contained a section "Population Pressure: Its Bearing on Development. " However, most Indian policymakers, at that time did not view it as a pressing issue as they believed that as per the Demographic Transition Theory, high economic growth would in turn take care of the population rate just as it had in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. However India did not have the luxury of utilizing resources from its colonies to feed its growth like the European powers had done in the colonial era and with increasing health facilities, increasing life expectancy and lower mortality rate, an enormous strain on the country’s resources, despite advents like the green revolution, was evident, and the government was forced to intervene. Over the decades, family planning as a government policy has yo-yoed over different extremes. The methodologies have varied from a position in the early 1950s where the then Minister of Health only considered the "rhythm method" as morally correct and distributed beaded necklaces to women to determine their safe days, to a more hardened approach of coercive vasectomies and tubectomies in the 1970s wherein camps were set up, government employees threatened, and in states like Rajasthan, more than 7.8 million men were sterilized. However despite all legal and extra legal efforts, the population growth rate remained steadily high. A variety of reasons can be attributed to the failure of these policies. Most important of them emanate from the socio-economic peculiarities of India. In this paper, the population control aspects of all the Five Year Plans since independence and the National Population Policy of 2000 have been examined in varying detail. For this, first the policies have been contextualized and then their effectiveness, i.e. their effect on the birth rate has been scrutinized using empirical statistical data and research literature. Following this, the shortcomings of the policies have been touched upon and their reasons, especially the ones which are still pertinent in today’s context have been elaborated upon. Under Indira Gandhi’s tenure, three main obstacles for family planning in India were identified. First was the lack of contraceptive supplies, the second was inadequate medical personnel and finally the lack of awareness about the importance of birth control. However, these fail to go to the root of the problem. In India, the varying gender roles are a major contributor to this issue. In traditional Hindu societies, sons are supposed to be the ones who have the duty to perform "pinda dan" and are considered as the propagators of the family line. Additionally, it is believed that through marriage, women become a part of their husband’s family. It was the son who apart from being the economic breadwinner was responsible for ensuring the well-being of his parents during their old age. Other factors in this discussion include the aspect of religion based misgivings to contraception, the high mortality rate triggering a failsafe mechanism and the vicious cycle of having a high percentage of population in the reproductively active age. For population control plans to actually succeed, their importance in the private lives of individuals needs to be evident, as was corroborated in the Harvard sponsored Khanna Study, conducted in the early 1950s and for that, rather than just birth rate, an holistic overall health approach needs to be adopted that includes the well being of the mother and the child, even after birth. In this paper, the population policies from the countries like, inter alia, China and Indonesia, which face a similar population problem, have also been examined and their best practices have been extracted to arrive at suggestions to improve the presently ineffective Indian system. Many of these suggestions can also be adapted to suit the needs of other similarly placed nations. Family Planning is a highly complex, multifaceted, yet compelling issue and the fact that it is intrinsically linked with sustainable development makes it an exceptionally relevant and pertinent topic in the Indian as well as the international scenario.