POPULATION-INDIA: Silently, Provinces Enforce Two-Children Norm

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

T V Padma

NEW DELHI, Aug 14 2002 (IPS) - Several Indian states have been silently enforcing a two-children norm that may worsen the country’s already skewed sex ratio and in the long run ruin the chances of women taking part in local governance, experts here warn. India’s National Population Policy (NPP), released in 2000, aims to have the country — now with a population of more than one billion — achieve a stable population by 2045. India is expected to have 1.63 billion people by 2050.

This population policy does not state that couples should not have more than two children, but it contains measures that encourage small families. An example is the family welfare- linked social insurance scheme for couples below the poverty line, which is available for those with two or less children. There is also a reward for couples that marry after the legal age of 21, and accept sterilisation after the second child.

But now, several Indian states – they determine health and population policy under the country’s federal system — have gone a step further with their individual population policies. Six states debar couples with more than two children from contesting elections for local village administrative bodies called ‘panchayats’. These include the southern Andhra Pradesh state, the northern states of Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan, eastern Orissa and central Madhya Pradesh.

Ten years ago, India reserved a third of all elected seats in ‘panchayats’ and other local bodies for women — but it now turns out that many potential women leaders may not qualify simply because they have more than two children. Additionally, the population policy of western state Maharashtra recommends withdrawal of subsidised food facilities under the Public Distribution System (PDS), and education facilities and welfare schemes for the third child onwards. Another ‘coercive’ measure announced in June by north-western Rajasthan state provides that those with more than two children would not be given government jobs, and if they are already in service, then they would be denied promotions. In northern Uttar Pradesh, financial assistance to the local administration bodies or ‘panchayats’ is linked to family planning performance.

The most adverse impact of the two-children norm is at the village ‘panchayat’ level, where the mostly poor and illiterate persons in villages are not even aware of the clause and are instantly disqualified from contesting elections, activists say.

It is at this level that there are a number of first-time entrants of women and weaker sections.

While women are disqualified for having more than two children, they also often have no say in reproductive health and rights matters and often have to give in to their husbands. They have lesser access to reproductive health services.

A recent study by the Mahila Chetna Manch, based in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, shows that some men go to the extent of denying the paternity of an additional child, and that officials go out of the way to conduct special surveys and even propose DNA tests to establish the child’s father. “We have also had cases where young women had to conceal their newborn, not be able to feed them,” said Nirmala Buch, a retired senior bureaucrat who is now chief of the Mahila Chetna Manch (Women’s Awareness Forum).

Often a man or a woman preferred not to contest the election rather than limit their family size, she observed. “Ultimately the state laws are adversely affecting women’s autonomy, their position in the family, and their reproductive rights instead of strengthening their capacity to limit their family size,” she said. The study concludes that the new clause barring persons with more than two children from contesting ‘panchayat’ elections would jeopardise attempts to involve disadvantaged sections in the political process. The study was conducted in five of the six states pushing the two-children norm.

Incentives and disincentives are damaging if there are no equal opportunities, Francois Farah, country representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Delhi, said at a seminar discussing the study last month.

The warning is echoed by Dr Mohan Rao, associate professor at the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Rao was one of the earliest to warn that incentives and disincentives offered by the states adversely affect the poor and weaker sections of society, like the lower castes and tribals who have to bear the brunt of the withdrawal of a range of subsidies and poverty mitigation measures. Activists also fear that the sex ratio will be further skewed with the implicit and explicit promotion of a two-children norm. “When one imposes a small family norm on societies with a traditional son preference, the societies automatically prefer to have sons,” Farah said. The Mahila Chetna Manch study corroborates this fear through findings that men are forcing their wives to go in for pre-natal sex determination tests, and then abort female foetuses but retain male ones. Others are deserting their wives or sending away their pregnant wives. “Such quick-fix (population) policies will not work. They not only fail to address the issues but will be counter-productive,” Farah warned. The ground reality is that in India, as in most Asian societies, the status of a woman depends on how many sons she has, she added.

Already the consequences are obvious in northern Punjab and Haryana states, which have the most adverse male to female ratios in India.

Census figures released in 2001 showed a sharp decline in India’s sex ratio of children in the 0-6 years group, with 927 girls to 1000 boys with Punjab showing a decline to 882 women for every 1000 men compared to 874 10 years ago. Pre-natal diagnostic tests, which were originally developed for early detection of genetic abnormalities in foetuses, are widely being misused to find out the sex of the unborn child and terminate pregnancy if the foetus is female, points out Man Mohan Sharma, executive director of the Punjab unit of the Voluntary Health Association of India.

POPULATION-INDIA: Silently, Provinces Enforce Two-Children Norm

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

T V Padma

NEW DELHI, Aug 14 2002 (IPS) - Several Indian states have been silently enforcing a two-children norm that may worsen the country’s already skewed sex ratio and in the long run ruin the chances of women taking part in local governance, experts here warn.
(more…)