India's misconceived family plan
Jacobson, J.L.
World Watch 4(6): 18-25
1991
ISSN/ISBN: 0896-0615 PMID: 12284385 Document Number: 315753
India's goal of reducing the national birth rate by 50% by the year 2000 is destined to failure in the absence of attention to poverty, social inequality, and women's subordination--the factors that serve to perpetuate high fertility. There is a need to shift the emphasis of the population control effort from the obligation of individual women to curtail childbearing to the provision of the resources required for poor women to meet their basic needs. Female children are less likely to be educated or taken for medical care than their male counterparts and receive a lower proportion of the family's food supply. This discrimination stems, in large part, from parents' view that daughters will not be able to remunerate their families in later life for such investments. The myth of female nonproductivity that leads to the biased allocation of family resources overlooks the contribution of adult women's unpaid domestic labor and household production. Although government statistics state that women comprise 46% of India's agricultural labor force (and up to 90% of rural women participate in this sector on some basis), women have been excluded systematically from agricultural development schemes such as irrigation projects, credit, and mechanization. In the field of family planning, the Government's virtually exclusive focus on sterilization has excluded younger women who are not ready to terminate childbearing but would like methods such as condoms, diaphragms, IUDs, and oral contraceptives to space births. More general maternal-child health services are out of reach of the majority of poor rural women due to long distances that must be travelled to clinics India's birth rate could be reduced by 25% by 2000 just by filling the demand for quality voluntary family planning services. Without a sustained political commitment to improve the status of women in India, however, such gains will not be sustainable.