Sreelatha Menon: Kerala`s bitter pill for birth control

EAR TO THE GROUND

The Kerala government plans to punish couples who have a third child with a fine of Rs 10,000, a move that will smudge the state’s image of being a model for development.

Should parents be penalised for having more than two children? The government of Kerala thinks so. It is drafting a legislation for penalising parents having a third child with a fine of Rs 10,000. What is surprising is that this violation of human rights of the parents and the third child is being contemplated in a state that is considered a model for literacy and land reforms leading to most parents opting for smaller families.

That a nonagenarian former chief justice will head the committee to draft the draconian legislation for the Marxist government is ironic given the injustice involved in the measure.

There are many who will praise such a step in a country where people have been trained to think that their very existence in the country is their biggest offence.

It was the example of Kerala that made many policy-makers rethink the obsession with the two-child norm. It was Kerala that made them conclude that development led to birth control, not the other way round.

Kerala achieved a fall in birth rates across communities without draconian measures. In other states’ rural areas, where illiteracy is widespread, communities are still not empowered enough to make choices. The Left backed the Congress to include in the common minimum programme a provision for targeted reduction in population, in a revival of the government’s obsession with birth control. Some states have even gone to the extent of denying people their democratic right to contest the panchayat elections if they have more than two children. The courts have winked at this Constitutional violation.

Among the educated urban classes, the two-child norm has led parents to achieve the target at the cost of eliminating the girl child.

Kerala has an annual population growth rate of 0.9 per cent, as against the national rate of 1.93 per cent per annum. The rate for Sweden, which is facing a number crunch, is 0.09 per cent. So Kerala should, in fact, start worrying about its falling numbers.

According to a recent study by the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala will achieve zero growth rate, that is, the number of births and deaths will be equal, in another two decades. And in 2022, 33 per cent people will be older than 49 years. Today, there are 14 births and nine deaths per 1,000 people in a year. In 20 years, this gap will go, say the authors of the study.

Xiaolu Guo, the Chinese writer and film-maker, in her novel, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, narrates the story of Fenfang, a village woman’s tryst with Beijing, her night in the police station for having brought in an American guest, for having boy friends. If Fenfang finds herself in Kerala after the new legislation comes into force, she would be in jail for having her third baby too.

Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan seems to aspire to recreating the restrictive regime of China. But the China of his dreams has already discovered that its dream of one child per family has turned sour and is going easy, learning from Chairman Mao, who said, “We must be excellent at learning to adapt one’s thinking to new conditions...’’. China is learning from countries in Europe which are now offering land to anyone who is ready to settle in their sparse countries.

Maybe it is high time someone penalised the states that encroached on the rights of their citizens through such laws, running roughshod over the country’s Constitution, which allows Indians the right to freedom and equality.