While India fights hard to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis has once again brought to light why India as a whole, and particularly some cities of the country have become so vulnerable to the disease. While there is a lot of noise happening on better planning, affordable housing, quality of life, etc., as a focus area to beat the devils of high population density and extremely poor living conditions of those at the bottom of the pyramid, unfortunately, nobody is talking about the elephant in the room: a legislation to effectively control population explosion in the second-most populous country in the world.
As per the United Nations ‘World Population Prospectus, 2019’ Report, released in June 2019, India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2027. Worse still, are the figures of the economic survey tabled by the Finance Ministry in 2018, which points out that the desire to have a male child has resulted in 21 million notionally ‘unwanted’ girls in India. And, families continue to have children until they have a desired male child.
A Law To Contain The Population Is Just A Patriotic Act, We Need It
It is not just astonishing that a country like ours, whose root cause problem has been population explosion for years, does not have a law against population growth in force already, but is equally appalling that introduction of measures like this would still be considered as a ‘very bold’ step for any government who attempts to introduce it. Such social change by way of a stringent law does not fit the vote bank politics.
However, closing our eyes to this reality will now be suicidal and will keep making us vulnerable not just for the present pandemic, but for all future catastrophes.
There is a growing need to impose ‘Sensible Family Planning’. Such a legislation should be viewed as purely in the national interest and an act of patriotism, without attaching any religious or political layers to it. ‘Right to Life’ implies ‘Right to quality life’ and parents should be made equally responsible for providing the quality life to a child as much as the government.
Human life needs to be valued not only afterlife comes into existence but also at the stage of conception itself. The math is as simple as two plus two makes four. Unless we contain the number of people to be uplifted or we stop adding the numbers to our already over-burdened and depleting resources, there will never be an upliftment and we will keep seeking quality life forever.
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
There is some hope that a law on population explosion might be on cards, especially since our Prime Minister spoke about perils of population explosion in his Independence Day speech of 2019. A Rajya Sabha Member has also moved a private member bill in February 2020 proposing incentives to promote a two-child norm.
The Bill proposes a constitutional amendment for the government to provide incentives in taxation, education, and employment for those who adhere to a two-child norm including punitive provisions against those who violate it. But can India afford to have a blanket two-child norm without attaching any economic parameters for having such two children, when it has started so late in the game?
Desperate times call for desperate measures and the government, while drafting a legislation, should provide for some sort of criteria as a pre-requisite for having a second child.
Certain mandatory factors could be prescribing (i) minimum income and savings of the parents; (ii) size of the house and number of family members living together; (iii) means of parents to educate a child, etc. Instead of having centralized policies, the parameters of such policies should be different for cities and rural areas considering the demographics on case to case basis.
While, such policies have the potential of being highly criticized for being discriminatory, but if looked at it from the perspective of a better quality of life in terms of education, employment and healthcare, such drastic measures will reap the benefits in long term. Though China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979 and in force for more than 30 years i.e. till 2015, has been criticized, it did show positive results on better health care, better education, availability of jobs, less competition, etc.
India needs to adopt a holistic approach of balanced legislation as well as increased efforts towards reformative awareness to achieve the objective effectively.
Policy decisions against the regularization of slums, time to time extension of eligibility criteria of slum dwellers for rehabilitation, migration of population to cities, are also required on an immediate basis to discourage the addition of new slum-colonies in certain cities only, but that’s a story for another day.