IS THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACTUALLY ENCOURAGING A POPULATION BOOM?

The Government of India seems to be at odds with itself over its many & varied policies on how many children you & I should have. On the one hand it seems to be genuinely & even desperately cracking down on population growths, sometimes with disastrous effects. We all know what a Government desperate to reduce the population did eons ago in Uttar Pradesh via the then can do no wrong absolutist Mr.Sanjay Gandhi. He had initiated compulsory sterilisation schemes which in actuality only ended up sterilizing the fate of the Congress for many generations to come in Indias biggest M.P (Member of Parliament) supplier Uttar Pradesh (U.P), a state the size of many countries in other continents, & indeed our own. Other than this desperate measure where unsuspecting rural men in aforementioned U.P were tied up & er.. nipped in the bud, so to speak, the Government has been consistently spending crores & crores of rupees in the Hum do, Hamare Do campaigns & other such Family Planning measures. Red Triangle, healthy anganwadis etc etc. All these campaigns & efforts have led to two sure results: 1) A LOT of money has been spent on these campaigns over the decades. 2) it has had little or no effect. Isnt it time then that the Government accepts that a pan Indian solution to Family Planning is not the solution & that an in-depth, localized area approach is the answer? Not some tawrdy, one size fits all approach? After all, which nation can boast of such a diverse ethnic constitution as India? We have here a representation of almost all the races & religions of the world in a huge melting pot, happily stewing together.

The approach you need in Kerala Indias most literate state (also with the highest suicide rate) may vary very much with the approach you need in U.P (where a high Infant Mortality rate is a very real factor that needs to be considered). Of course, crossing geographical boundaries, we need to look at the psychological boundaries that sturdily & stubbornly exist in all Indians. Muslims in India are convinced

that they need to breed, so that they become the most populous nation on earth. Hindus cannot achieve Nirvana till they sire a male child, so they breed till they get one worse, the affluent resort to cruder means sex selective abortions a.k.a murder. Then we have the Catholics, who believe that contraception amounts to murder as it kills the an embryo, which is actually a growing child! Dont even ask them about abortion. A doctor who famously supported & practiced abortion was shot dead in the UK!! So in a very secular fashion, all the three major religions seem to be against contraception & thus Family Planning. While I readily have a workable solution to this curly jalebi mess that we have made, what I want to ask is this How effective has the Government been in encouraging & promoting those states that have a low birth rate & a high literacy rate? (The two invariably follow each other). We all know that the Government of India through its Delimitation Committee regularly modifies the number of M.Ps a state can send to Parliament, based on their population every 2 decades. With the uncontested spiraling of population rates that the BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan & Uttar Pradesh) states readily displayed, a stop was put to the regular re-jig & thus Southern states send 14 more than they should, while UP sends at least 7 less than it should. A very real reason for this approach is the fact that the Southern states might be encouraged to start breeding in order to get more representation at the Centre. This could only end up in a population nightmare. Anyway alls well that ends well & the southern states, which contribute the most to the Center in terms of taxes, maintained their relatively low birth rates, while its only been up, up & up for the BIMARU states. Isnt it time that the smaller states in India stopped crying themselves hoarse about how neglected they are by the Center? How they dont have a voice? How their problems are relegated to the backwaters & how little they get in terms of funds & representation? Dont we have a relatively simple solution in our hands? Why cant we have a one M.P for each small state solution? And maybe ten each for all the big states? It may appear simplistic, but then Albert did split an atom with a rather shortish line he called E=MC2. Isnt it rational, logical, fair & indeed practical? After all, why must the fact that U.P & the other BIMARU states bleeding us dry ultimately end up as a bonus for them? Why must they be rewarded for breeding? Why does the Government of India have a special talent for creating problems where none exist? For all the crores we spend daily & for all the map choppings in Kashmir, I DO know that Kashmir was still peaceful enough to be a popular Honeymoon destination in the 70s. Good enough for yesteryear actors Shammi Kapoor, Sharmilla Tagore et al to coyly prance around Dal Lake - the staple diet of all songs in the 70s. Today, no couple would go to Srinagar for a honeymoon, unless they are not really fond of their hubby & are looking for a solo trip back! As for Bollywood, a movie in Kashmir today can only mean Terrorists, terrorists & more terrorists. Why did we allow the situation in Kashmir to get so bad? Why did we allow Arunachal to be SO neglected that we began noticing it ONLY after China finally said it

belonged to them?? This is becoming a pattern. It was hilarious. Arunachal FINALLY got a visit from the Home Minister & the Prime Minister no less, months after China declared it to be their territory. I had the chance to visit Arunachal as a child. I was appalled at the condition of the place. There were areas where you had to drive across streams to reach the capital city Itanagar. I even saw a typical ethnic lady, face fully tattooed, top naked, carrying a pile of sticks on her head about 45 minutes from the capital!! For me, a child then, it was pure National Geographic stuff! This, at a time when India was leaping ahead, and we were having our fill of flyovers in other cities. Or is the Government sending a dangerous message to the smaller states?? That unless you breed & create a nuisance of yourself, we WILL not consider you or your problems? Please note that beating all the BIMARU states by more than a mile was Nagaland which recorded a path-breaking 20 odd % Population growth rate as per the latest census of India. In contrast, the highest BIMARU state was a relatively tame 6? %. While 20% of 20 lakhs is STILL much lesser than 6% of 10 crores, only a fool could be optimistic about where all this is heading ....