When women pay the price for State failure
What’s not to love about a chota parivaar (small family), that quintessential Indian family of parents and their two children? Fewer children means better maternal health, more judicious use of family resources, improved nutrition, higher education outcomes, and a healthier planet, already groaning under the weight of 7.9 billion humans.
And, yet, when the State plans laws to punish parents who cross the two-child limit, let’s be clear about who pays the highest price. It’s women, the poorest and most marginalised.
As Uttar Pradesh (UP) fine-tunes its draft population bill listing out disincentives for those who have more than two children — and thank you for the clarification that having two daughters is not a “deficiency” that grants wiggle room for a son — as many as 12 states already have policies that impose a slew of restrictions, from participating in panchayat elections to disqualification from government schemes.
Look at just one of these states: When
Haryana placed restrictions on candidates for the 2015 panchayat elections, 68% of Dalit women and 50% of all women were instantly disenfranchised, according to advocate Indira Jaising who challenged the move in the Supreme Court. Any move to cut women out of public life, where their participation is already circumscribed, must be resisted.
Women in India lack the agency to decide the most intimate aspects of their lives: Who they marry, when they get married, when they have children, and how many children they have. Yet, even with this limited agency, more are opting to use contraception. The latest round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows the highest use of contraception is among Muslim women (49%), compared to just 42.8% for Hindu women.
But NFHS also tells us of “unmet” needs in contraception — women who want to delay pregnancy (or not have one at all), but lack access to contraceptives. Nearly 13% of married women have this unmet need. And at 18%, UP has the second-highest unmet need for family planning, after Bihar at 21%.
The failure to provide family planning to women lies with the State. It cannot now seek to impose penalties on those who have more children than they planned because they could not access contraception. Women cannot pay the price for State failure.
But perhaps concerns over India’s burgeoning population — we will overtake China by 2027, says the United Nations — are misplaced. India’s growth trajectory is already slowing with decadal growth down from 21.5% in 1991-2001 to 17.7% during 20012011, according to the Census. Given our young demographic, the graph will keep climbing before it stabilises around 2050, says Poonam Muttreja of the Population Foundation of India.
Coercive policies haven’t worked in countries such as China, which saw a surge in sex-selective abortions. We have a lesson from India too. In 1977, following forced sterilisation in what was Sanjay Gandhi’s pet project during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi found herself voted out of power.