With clockwork regularity, our misinformed politicians invoke the population “problem” to explain the disappointing state of the nation’s progress on many fronts. I fear that these vague comments will erupt any day into a new ‘population control’ bill without any clarity on what we want – a lower growth rate, a higher population small, fewer people of a particular type – and exactly why and how we think each of these things is actually important.
Many arguments can be made against these attempts to resurrect the bogeyman of population growth as the main obstacle to development. For example, one can take a closer look at the supposed role of population growth in our current economic situation. Will the imposition of a two-child policy significantly alter the country’s population growth trajectory? And even if it does, will it suddenly increase our GDP growth? One can also consider the micro-level and human rights implications of a policy of population control. I address this second perspective here, at the individual level.
True, the devil is usually in the details, but let’s ignore for now what the details of a population control policy would be. Instead, let’s look at who exactly the law would apply to. Let us also pretend to believe that the government’s motives for such a law are innocent of a deeper malevolence towards certain specific groups in the country, those it is accused of also targeting through supposedly egalitarian policies like the triple talak bill, the revocation of Section 370 and now the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Register of Citizens and the National Register of Population.
The question of population generally suffers from “us” versus “them” explanations. Housewives regularly blame the unbridled fertility of their servants, the wealthy scoff at the unhealthy hypersexuality of the poor, the clever city dwellers lament the large families of simple villagers, the educated laugh at the irresponsible repeated pregnancies among the illiterate, the privileged blame those from below for our population growth.
Such offhand comments may be crude, but they actually contain some truth. All past and present data indeed find that the highest fertility rates are found among the poor, rural and less educated. In the latest cycle (2015-2016) of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS4), the total fertility rate (TFR) for village India was 2.4 against 1.8 for India. Urban India; 3.1 for women with no education compared to 1.7 for women with 12 or more years of education; 3.2 for the lowest wealth quintile and 1.5 for the highest wealth quintile; 2.26 for scheduled castes versus 1.93 for non-SC/ST/OBC groups.
This means that our efforts to impose a two-child standard in the country should disproportionately target the rural, poor, less educated and socially disadvantaged. Is this how we want to treat our most disadvantaged citizens? Can we really assume that it is irresponsibility, ignorance, irrationality and sheer malice that explain their greater fecundity?
Should we rather recognize the precariousness of their lives? Should we read some of the research literature that demonstrates that it is their poverty, illiteracy and lack of opportunity that tilts their cost-benefit calculation in the direction of children being the main source of security – for protect them in times of crisis, old age, conflict, natural disaster? Instead of haranguing them to have fewer children, shouldn’t a truly benevolent government do more to increase their incomes, their education and their prospects for social and economic mobility, so that children cease to be their first insurance? against risk?
Add to that the fact that it is the children of this segment of the population who face the most serious threats to their survival as adults and you can see why it makes sense to have three or four births to ensure that there will be two or three alive. when their support is needed.
Now let’s move on to the elephant in the room. In NFHS4, the TFR was 2.62 for Muslims compared to 2.13 for Hindus. Muslim fertility is indeed higher than Hindu fertility, corn:
(1) It’s not so much higher and
(2) The gap narrowed rapidly – just 10 years earlier in NFHS3 the TFR for Muslims was 3.40 and for Hindus 2.59 – a difference of 0.81 births which has now become a difference of 0.49 births per woman.
In other words, while Hindu and Muslim birth rates fell, they fell faster for Muslims.
Combined with the well-documented lower socio-economic levels of Muslims in relation to the Hindus of this country – for which several factors besides discrimination are responsible, for example, many of the upper class Muslims of India left the country at the time of partition – hardly any explanation is needed “religious” for the slightly higher fertility of Muslims. If religion is to be brought into the picture, it will have to be done largely in the context of the “minority group hypothesis” – minorities everywhere, especially when they are equally socio-economically disadvantaged , tend to feel more insecure than the mainstream population and a higher birthrate population is often a way to deal with this insecurity.
That there is nothing intrinsically Islamic about high fertility in the world today is well illustrated by the rapid decline in birth rates that we have seen over the past few decades in several predominantly Muslim countries such as Iran, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
And yet every few days some politician or acquaintance or friend or relative conjures up images of horror of Muslim population growth rates dwarfing Hindu growth in India; makes crude calls to suppress Muslim fertility; alludes to completely irrelevant (and false) things like the four wives that Muslim men are supposed to have access to and the ‘baby manufacturing factories‘ (we know who said that) what happened to the Muslim refugee camps.
A population policy that decrees a two-child family is therefore tailored to target the weakest segments of our population – the poor, the rural, the less educated and, in a country increasingly torn by sectarianism and division , Muslims of course.
In addition to targeting those who have the greatest reasons to increase their fertility, such an edict also opens up many possibilities for punishment, extortion, intimidation and denigration against precisely those who are least able. to fight back and who have the most to lose. We must not forget the cruel excesses of emergency population control measures in India. And we need to learn about the cruelty and human rights abuses surrounding China’s one-child policy more recently. Women were particularly victims of the zeal with which the policy was implemented.
It should be noted that China is now keen on an increase in birth rates to sustain its dwindling workforce as its population ages to developed country levels, but without the necessary developed country income levels. to sustain this aging population. But this macro-level impact of a short-sighted, knee-jerk population control policy is for another article.
Alaka M. Basu is a social demographer working on reproductive health and family planning and a professor in the Department of Developmental Sociology at Cornell University, as well as currently a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, Washington DC.