Childs Play

The Sultan decreed that any women who had a boy would be debarred from further production. Girls, on the other hand, could be born ad menopausam. He thought this would skew female-male ratios the way he desired. Actually, the ratio remains the same. For, approximately 50 of the first 100 children born would be male, and so would 50 of the next 100, and so on.

Renuka Chowdh-urys suggestion of adopting the Chine-se system of licensing one-baby famili-es will however end up skewing female-male ratios, although that probably wasnt her intention. Its a formidable task anyway. Even the undemocratic Chinese had problems enf-orcing this edict. In India, Morarji owed his prime ministership to Sanjay Gandhis overzealous pursuit of the same cause during the Emergency. The mind boggles at the political fallout of enforcement. Imagine a transplantation of the Chinese model of forced abortions and vasectomies coupled with rampant female infanticide. Add to it the homespun amniocentesis-based abortions. Girls being a major liability (what with dowry and all that), an already skewed Indian ratio of 945 females per 1,000 males would end up with a further male bias.

 

One-baby restriction is a typical license raj solution to an industrial oversupply problem. Like most such throwbacks, its likely to be both inefficient and unpopular. Production ceilings and cutbacks are always more effective when workers understand why. The classic solution is education. Baby-making has a well-established inverse relationship with education and sexual awareness.

But, the primary problem in education is that not enough Indians go to school and schools dont teach enough about the explicit processes of baby-making. Nor does TV which is the other mass media vehicle. Indians continue to do what comes naturally, and every 1.9 seconds, the population clock ticks. Sexual education takes time, is unglamorous and probably unpopular with the moral majority. Remember Sushma Swarajs blanket ban of sexual education via TV when she was the I&B boss?

Licensing will on-ly negatively impact growth after it crea-tes a severe female scarcity. That will take several generations and inevitably bring higher incid-ences of gay behaviour in its wake as men turn to each other for relief. This is not just illegal; one suspects Chowdhu-ry would prefer not to go down in history as the liberator of Indian gays. It might offend the moral majority even more than sex-education.

Luckily the whole morass is something she can comfortably avoid. All she has to do is wait since the fastest market-related solution is already being implemented and the results will soon be visible. The health ministry merely has to continue to ignore Aids as it has done till date with such splendid single-mindedness. The friendly neighbourhood virus will soon induce large cutbacks in the baby-making industry upto 50 million workers could be downsized permanently in the next decade. The survivors will be fanatics about protected sex. A side effect of sexual protection is birth control. So the license raj will inevitably be replaced by the contraceptive raj.