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By Laxmi Murthy Since the mid-' 90s, the Indian government has attempted to make a shift from the target-oriented approach to family planning to one of advocacy, quality of care and individual choice. Now, with the Supreme Court upholding the two-child norm for contesting panchayat elections and with some states formulating anti-people population policies, there seems to be a return to coercive methods
 By upholding the two-child norm for contesting panchayat (local self-government) elections, the Supreme Court would have us believe the oft-repeated propaganda that a "small family is a happy family". A three-judge Bench comprising Justice RC Lahoti, Justice Ashok Bhan and Justice Arun Kumar on July 30, 2003 observed that "disqualification on the right to contest an election for having more than two living children does not contravene any fundamental right, nor does it cross limits of reasonability."
Not only did the Bench dismiss a batch of 200 petitions challenging the constitutional validity of a provision in the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act, 1994, which restricts contesting of elections depending on family size, the Court endorsed this law as a "disqualification conceptually devised in the national interest." A decade after the passing of the 73rd Amendment which empowered the panchayat as a system of local self-government and provided for 33% reservation for women, this order of the apex court appears divorced from ground reality. Women's groups from the years preceding the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, attempted to reshape population agendas and advocated a shift from the 'demographic imperative language' to one of women's rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to link population and consumption patterns and also address the issue of male responsibility in reproduction and contraception. The Supreme Court order contravenes the spirit of the Cairo Document, to which the Government of India is also a signatory. Principle 8, ICPD, 1994, declares, "States should take all appropriate measures to ensure, on a basis of equality of men and women, universal access to health care services, including those related to reproductive health care, which includes family planning and sexual health... and provide the widest range of reproductive healthcare services without any form of coercion. All couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information, education and means to do so." In fact, the government itself admits (on its official website) the failure of the target-oriented approach of population control. "The target-based system followed up to 31st March, 1996, suffered from negligence of the quality of services provided to the people under family welfare program. The needs of the individual client were not properly met. Thus the numerical method-specific targets provided such type of demographic planning which is against the democratic ethos of the country." From the mid-'90s onwards, the government attempted to make a paradigm shift in its approach to family planning to one of advocacy, quality of care and individual choice. This perspective also informs the National Population Policy, 2000. But in a complete turnaround, the government today appears to be reaffirming its faith in coercive methods and has allowed states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh to formulate anti-people population policies -- leading to fears that attempts are being made to push coercive population policies through the backdoor. Uttar Pradesh's Population Control Bill, 2002, for instance, is one such document that embodies these undemocratic measures. These state population policies and the UP Bill contain a series of disincentives and incentives that are anti-women, anti-adivasi, anti-dalit and anti-poor. The disincentives proposed include denying ration cards and education in government schools for the third child; withdrawal of a range of welfare programmes for people belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes who have more than two children; and debarring people with more than two children from government jobs as well as contesting elections for local self-government. Women's groups and health activists in the capital managed to scuttle the Delhi and UP Bill and highlighted these human rights violations in a petition to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in July last year. Quoting the National Family Health Survey, 1998-99, which shows that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is 3.15 for Scheduled Castes, 3.06 for Scheduled Tribes and 3.47 among illiterate women as a whole, the petition says: "Imposition of the two-child norm, and the disincentives proposed, would thus mean that significant sections among those already deprived populations would bear the brunt of the state's withdrawal of ameliorative measures, as pitiably inadequate as they are." The conflating of 'national interest' with population control has serious negative implications, more dangerous because raising questions could be dubbed 'anti-national'.
The fallout of making eligibility for contesting panchayat elections contingent on family size is already being seen in many states. As reported by P Sainath (The Hindu, July 27, 2003) , the sarpanch of Kondapur in Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, has not sent his three children to school, lest the official records show that he has more than two children, and is therefore ineligible for the post of sarpanch.
A study conducted in 2002 by Mahila Chetna Manch, a Bhopal-based NGO, on the implications and consequences of the two-child norm in PRIs, reveals that "The way the norm is conceptualised and currently implemented is not without serious unintended negative consequences".The study, commissioned by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and supported by UNFPA, covered Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan, contacting 262 respondents and examining 40 case studies. The stories of women are revealing. In Madhya Pradesh, a woman sarpanch and her husband, a panchayat member, gave up their third child (a daughter) for adoption, and in another instance, a man denied he was the father, leading to a DNA test being proposed to prove the paternity of the baby. Deserting pregnant wives, concealment of babies, tampering with birth certificates and immunisation records in anganwadis, increasing pre-natal sex determination followed by abortion of female foetuses are other alarming, but not unexpected outcomes of enforcing of the two-child 'norm'.
The study also revealed that more than 50% of those disqualified under the provisions of the 'two-child' norm were either illiterate or had primary education only. Economically and socially vulnerable sections suffered the most as 75% of those disqualified belonged to SC, ST and backward classes. The Panchayati Raj Update, a newsletter published by the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, has also documented cases of denial of parentage, abortions, infants being abandoned and given up to other family members to beat the two-child norm. Sutra, an NGO based in Solan, Himachal Pradesh, has been monitoring cases and found that about 10 elected representatives of Solan and Sirmour have received notices under the two-child norm. Needless to say, the majority are women. In one case, the husband gave an affidavit the moment he realised his wife was pregnant, stating that the woman and child belong to his brother. This is a very complicated issue in areas like Sirmour where polyandry is still practiced. Women's groups have also emphasised the fact that policies of population control are targeted at women, who have larger numbers of children for complex reasons that range from immediate survival and necessity, to high infant mortality, lack of access to health services and patriarchal control over sexuality and reproduction. In the absence of state-supported social welfare, children are the only security in illness and old age, and are viewed as additional working hands and family support, rather than extra consumers who will drain the family resources. Given these complex realities the Court's declaration that "the problem of population explosion was a national and global issue and provided the justification for priority in policy oriented legislations wherever needed" seems rather short-sighted. In fact, labeling a demographic transition as a population 'explosion' is itself alarmist and unsubstantiated by data. Official records themselves show that the Crude Birth Rate has fallen by about half from 49.2 in 1911 to 24.8 in 2001. The Total Fertility Rate has come down to 3.2. The population growth can largely be attributed to a large 'young' population, and increased life expectancy, from an average of about 23 years in 1911 to about 65 years in 2001. When development issues like poverty eradication, female literacy, health, sanitation and infant mortality are addressed, people voluntarily opt for smaller families, as the experience worldwide, and closer home in Kerala, shows. By endorsing undemocratic laws like the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act, the Supreme Court order legitimises exclusion in democratic processes, thus reinforcing socio-economic and political disparity. (Laxmi Murthy is a freelance journalist specialising in gender and development. She has been active in the women's movement for the past 18 years) InfoChange News & Features, August 2003
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