Land distribution: a population stabilisation strategy?
Desai, S.; Alva, S.
Economic and Political Weekly 33(10): 533-536
1998
ISSN/ISBN: 0012-9976 Document Number: 526252
This paper argues that the current preoccupation in India with debates on family planning vis-a-vis development, has meant a neglect of issues of equity and the nature of development strategies. It focuses on the nature of land distribution, arguing that in a predominantly agricultural setting land ownership plays an important role in fertility decisions made by individual parents. Land is seen as a repository of wealth as well as a productive resource. It suggests that, whilst income and wealth have been shown to have a monotonically increasing inverse impact on fertility, the relationship between land ownership and fertility is curvilinear: the fertility decisions of landless workers are governed by factors other than land; large farmers need not worry about land division; it is primarily small farmers who are concerned about land fragmentation associated with high fertility. It dismisses fertility studies that maintain farms have increased demands for child labour by asking whether, in an India of pervasive rural unemployment, children can contribute significantly to household income above and beyond what they consume and whether they contribute more in farm households than among the landless. The thesis of this paper is illustrated by data from the National Family Health Survey (1992-93), which covers 89 777 randomly-interviewed married women between the ages of 13 and 49 from 25 states and Union Territories. The sample is restricted to currently married women between the ages of 20 and 49 years. The main dependent variable is children born in the previous five years to the interviewee; the analysis controls for measures of women's socioeconomic status. The results show that landed families have generally significantly fewer children than landless labourers and that, among landed families, marginal and sub-marginal farmers feel the greatest constraint of land availability on their fertility decisions. It concludes that redistribution of land merits greater implementation, since it also affects fertility.