This suggests that one need not look for the emergence of post-modern aspirations and ideologies for below-replacement families in countries like India. The motives underlying the first demographic transition do not respect the arbitrary floor of a TFR of 2 that demographers have set up. In as much as our survey data lend themselves to examination of these competing motives, we find only a modest relationship between family size and markers of either personal consumption or personal fulfillment. Instead, the central finding seems to be that the emerging one child family in India, rather than resting on a base of greater parental desires and freedoms, seems to focus even more on investing in this single child. However, there is great deal of similarity between East Asia and India in the increased resources needed to raise a child with a satisfactory potential future. In a society in which intergenerational expectations continue to be bidirectional, rearing such a child also means a marked rise in parental status and fortunes and, to that extent, the one child family is certainly an indicator of sharply rising social and economic aspirations.
ii. Heavy investments in children
As we look at these ongoing parallel transitions – the first demographic transition in developing countries, and what is often called the the second demographic transition in industrialized countries – it is important to think about the relationship between the two. Unless we understand the forces that propel a nation from the first into the second demographic transition, it is difficult to foresee what might lie in the future for middle income countries whose Total Fertility Rate lies between 2 and 3. Union Minister Ramdas Athawale said on Saturday that there should be a one child norm in the country as a measure to control population growth. “Educating girls is the most effective contraceptive,” she said, pointing to data showing that Indian women with 12 years of schooling have no more than two children, while those with no education have an average of three, according to the latest survey results. Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, celebrated the survey results as proof of the power of persuasion over more direct interventions such as China’s notorious one-child policy.
- What seems to have caused the furore in UP is the timing of the announcement, coming as it did with state elections just eight months away.
- (May contain harsh words) People needs to understand the concept of family planning and shouldn’t raise children to which they can’t support.
- Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, said the incident from Madhya Pradesh underlines the possible adverse consequences of coercive population policies.
- In its reply, the Centre said it is “unequivocally” against forcing people to have only a certain number of children in a bid to control the population.
Much of the literature on fertility decline has focused on external and internal constraints to childbearing. We suggest here that it may be useful to flip this perspective and to consider that low fertility might be a response to new opportunities and to compare predictions based on constraints vis-à-vis predications based on new opportunities. Our data do not allow us to go far back in time on this question, but Table 2, which includes information on proportions of one child families according to maternal age from National Family Health Survey I, conducted in 1992–93 and National Family Health Survey III, conducted in 2005–06 offers a clue.
Talking about India as a whole is like talking about a continent. In that case, what should be the policy direction for economic growth? We need to act before it becomes a cultural norm to have only one child, or none at all.
Politics dominates the proposed two-child norm in Uttar Pradesh
It is also assumed that people will aspire for leadership positions in the panchayati raj institutions and hence will choose to have a maximum of two children. However, experts feel the two-child norm is problematic at many levels. Immense criticism of the policy has emerged, with experts seeing it as discriminatory and saying it violates the rights of individuals. Studies have shown it is proving counterproductive due to its negative impact on marginalised sections and women.
According to the Reserve Bank of India, India’s percentage in poverty is way over the world average. India ranks the first in poverty percentage (United Nations).This is a huge number and most likely caused by lack of resources for the huge population that India has. After the implementation of the one child policy, it has alleviated poverty by promoting family planning, holding population growth under control and raising the life quality of the population in those areas. According to the National Bureau of Statistics in China, the poverty proportion in China has decreased from 35% in 1978 to 15% in 1985, and there is a continuous decrease in the poverty proportion (see Fig. 1).
- Despite decreasing birth rates, some political leaders have actually promoted for the adoption of something like China’s previous one-child policy in northern states with big Muslim populations.
- Finally, in April 1996, the targets-based approach was abandoned and substituted by a decentralised approach with a focus on community needs and health rather than demography.
- Families would have to take permission from a committee before having a third child, the bill said.
- Does it mean that in the future, we should see greater divergence between the fertility rates of poor states in the North and affluent states in the South?
- Perhaps the move from TFRs of 3+ to 2 children is often merely a less extreme version of the move from 3+ to 1 child.
One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment Hardcover – 5 January 2016
Having more than one child, he suggested, one child policy in india provides families greater security. The freedom to have a family, and to decide the size of your family, is established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and should never be violated. A no less fundamental right is to be able to make that choice, through having the services needed to exercise it, including contraception, abortion and comprehensive sexuality education. Exercising that choice, especially for the most vulnerable in society, must also mean freedom from punishment and disadvantage from those in power for making choices different to those they want you to. In an effort to promote birth-spacing methods and move towards a healthier method mix, the Government of India has tried to increase the basket of contraceptive choices in the last two decades.
Short-term electoral gains are the last thing that should dictate any approach to population control. Data from across the world shows that countries with successful family planning programmes have very low use of sterilisation. According to Argentina Matavel Piccin, the India Representative of the UN Population Fund, the earlier focus on irreversible methods such as sterilisation to reduce fertility rate has been a hard habit to break among healthcare providers. Reversible methods are more convenient to use and allow birth spacing between two children.
Unintended consequences
The Minister also ruled out that there is a higher growth in Muslim population in the country as is being projected by a section of BJP and RSS and also denied any large scale conversions. A confluence of factors from the government to village level came together to bring about the change, but one of the most important has been improvements to education, according to Muttreja. With nearly two-third of India’s population between 15 and 59—as revealed by the Sample Registration System’s 2018 report—India boasts of a demographic dividend of a young population even as major economies of the world struggle with a declining working age population. India has more working age people than any other country in the world. Its share of the working-age population is set to almost peak by the end of this decade—from 55.8 per cent now to 58.8 per cent in 2031. However, when it comes to states there is huge disparity in terms of population growth and TFR.
(a) Women’s Workforce Participation and Childbearing
In 1979, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in China was approximately 2.75. TFR is the number of children, on average, born to each woman in the country during her lifetime. While fertility measures in China are still highly uncertain, most experts agree that the TFR is now well below 2.1. Compared to Pakistan, China has a larger geographical area and a larger population. Comparatively speaking, China’s population is less dense than that of Pakistan and India.
In her 2006 book, The Law of Two Child Norm in Panchayats, Nirmala Buch, a former chief secretary of MP, documented how the two-child law in various states led to a rise in sex-selective and unsafe abortions. Men divorced their wives to run for local body polls and families gave up children for adoption to avoid disqualification. The decline in population growth rates for Jains (20.5 per cent), Buddhists (16.7 per cent), Sikhs (8.5 per cent) and Christians (7 per cent) was even more steep during the same period.
One-Child Policy in India Needed: MoS Social Justice Ramdas Athawale
A remedy often suggested by members of the Sangh Parivar to deal with “population imbalance” runs counter to the two-child norm policy. In fact, calls have been made to families to have greater number of children to counter the “population imbalance”. Members of the Sangh Parivar have repeatedly spoken about the alleged spectre of “population imbalance” in India. RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale on November 1, while addressing the RSS’ All India Executive Body meeting in Jabalpur, urged the Union government to quickly come up with a population policy to deal with the “demographic imbalance”.
The fertility crisis we are seeing is fundamentally an urban problem. Urban India has had below-replacement fertility rates for the last 25 years. China is similar in that it is also a culturally traditional society, but they had a coercive state policy, limiting families to one child. Yes, they have grown remarkably over the last 40 years, but they have not become rich.
Hopes, Dreams and Anxieties: India’s One-Child Families
This is seen most pointedly in the recent change in the shifts in the one-child policy of the Chinese state, and the newly drafted Indian Surrogacy Bill. In the late 20th century, both countries woke up to the need to manage the fallout of their population policies. These policies, combined with new sex determination technologies and widely prevalent culture of son-preference have exacerbated gender inequality in the form of skewed sex ratios. The resulting bride shortages have led to a marriage crisis and stoked local as well as global social anxieties. In China, there are fears of environmental and industrial pollution leading to a diminution in sperm quality; in India ethnically varying fertility transitions are deployed to further religious and political agendas; globally there is the spectre of ‘surplus’ men and ‘scarce’ women in rising Asia.
