COVER STORY/POPULATION

BE IT a political meeting, a hot TV debate or just a healthy tea-time chat, the topic would most often veer around population. That was about four decades back. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought the debate back to the discussion table after he used the term “population explosion” in his Independence Day speech last year. The term had not been used by any of his predecessors since the country’s disastrous experience of forced family planning during the Emergency period in the 1970s. Since then, population control remains a political pariah. But Modi set the debate on a new trajectory. He equated population control to patriotism. “A small section of society, which keeps its families small, deserves respect. What it is doing is an act of patriotism,” he said.

Of late, politicians have been vocal in pushing the population control debate. It has erupted in a paroxysm of deep fear of demographic disaster and complete exhaustion of natural resources due to over consumption. At this age of the sixth mass extinction and the Anthropocene, India is talking about its population, policy and the environmental fallout in the same breath.

In July 2019, Rakesh Sinha, Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha and subscriber to the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, tabled the Population Regulation Bill as a private member bill. The proposed legislation intends to penalise people for having more than two children. Sinha says “population explosion” would irreversibly impact India’s environment and natural resource base, and limit the next generation’s entitlement and progress. The bill proposes that government employees must not produce more than two children, and suggests withdrawal of welfare measures from the poor who have more than two children.

“Even opposition leaders have appreciated my effort in private,” claims Sinha. In September last year, Congress politician