The early 1970s were traumatic for Bangladesh. A bloody war with Pakistan led to the nation's birth, which was followed by severe floods, crop failures and famines. But Adrienne Germain of the International Women's Health Coalition in New York City takes issue with such poverty-driven reasoning for the drop. She holds that such empowerment, combined with better health care and education, will be essential to Bangladesh's maintaining its momentum. The final explanation for the population puzzle may lie in the information age.
Bangladeshi radio provides six hours of health and family-planning programming a day.
Such awareness, remarkable in a people that cannot be sure of getting two square meals a day, suggests that media messages can on occasion replace literacy. Across the border in the Indian state of West Bengal, fertility has also dropped, in a radial pattern around the city of Calcutta. Evidently, urban centers serve to somehow disseminate the idea that small families are better.