That India’s population is growing is something no one can deny. From around 350 million at the time of Independence to 1.02 billion by the 2001 Census—it is close to tripling of the number of people whose livelihoods, schooling and health have to be assured. At the same time, the growth rate of our population has been falling steadily. So also has been the number of children that the average woman in India can expect to have in her lifetime—from six in 1951 to only 2.7 by 2009 and still falling. Many states have already reached the level of two children.

Why then is the population still growing? The reason is population momentum—something similar to what happens when one applies the brakes on a speeding vehicle. It still keeps going a bit. In population, a momentum effect is created by having a very young population as we currently do. Even if each couple only has two children (exactly replacing themselves over time), the number who still have to marry and have families is large. Because of this larger base, the population will continue to grow for some time even at replacement level fertility.

According to demographers, only 6 per cent of the population growth in this century will be because women want to have more than two children. Almost 70 per cent will come from momentum. The rest will be due to the fact that people don’t have access to contraceptives or because the government’s family planning programmes are of poor quality or sometimes even coercive. Even in the northern states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, momentum will contribute over half of the growth in this century while the desire to have many children is much less.
What this means is that there is a new reality out there in terms of the drivers of population growth, one that the official family planning programme has been slow to recognise. Whenever the panic button is hit, coercion as during the Emergency, is brought into play. Coercion can take the form of actually forcing people into sterilisation camps, or it can take more subtle forms such as telling poor families that they cannot get access to the full benefits of welfare programmes for jobs or food or health-care, or that they cannot exercise the citizen’s right to hold electoral office (something we don’t deny even to accused criminals or even to some convicted ones in this country). But these kind of disincentives and even some incentives are really like beating the horse when it is already running!

Women in this country have become more and more aware of the value of having fewer children. What they do not control is the poor quality of the family planning services provided. Ensuring quality is not rocket science but it does require effective leadership, real commitment, clean facilities and re-training of the health workers on the ground. No middle class woman with the choice of paying and going to a private clinic would choose the government’s family planning services; but this is a choice poor women don’t really have, however much they may want to have fewer children.

Coming back to the question of population momentum: is there anything that the government can really do? Momentum, as we know, is actually a matter of time. Delaying having children or postponing the second birth actually works well to reduce the population growth rate due to momentum. One effective thing the government can do, therefore, is to make it possible for young couples to space their children better. It has to make more safe temporary contraceptive methods available, instead of putting all the eggs in the female sterilisation basket as happens today.

The other is to make it possible for young girls to marry later. This is where the government needs to step in—help girls to study beyond the primary school level, and create jobs for young girls passing out of secondary school. A major barrier is that, once a girl reaches menarche, families are afraid to send her to a secondary school that is far away from the village. And for the girls themselves, the absence of sanitation and clean water makes sitting for a whole day in school a miserable experience.

So here’s what we need to do: improve the quality of family planning services, make more safe and effective temporary methods of contraception available, improve sanitation and water facilities in post-primary schools, make it safe for young girls to go to school, and make schooling worthwhile through job creation. Above all, abandon coercion, disincentives and incentives in family planning. They do not work and people do not like them. That route is surely barking up the wrong tree!

Published 2011 January 30 at The Economic Times