India Crosses One Billion Population Mark

Union minister of state for health and family welfare N T Shanmugam has said India touched the one-billion population mark yesterday around 12.56 pm.

He was speaking at a function organised to mark the arrival of the billionth child at the New Delhi-based Safdarjung Hospital.

The girl child, born to Anjana and Ashok, is named Aastha. He also launched the national population policy website on the occasion.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said India's population was a serious matter and both a cause of concern and introspection.

"Concern over the impact that a runaway population growth is bound to have on the nation's economic, natural and other resources; introspection over where we went wrong and how we can stabilise our population," he said.

 

Conceding there were flaws in the four-decades-old population policy, Vajpayee said stabilisation could not be achieved without all-round socio-economic development and definitely not through coercion.

India has reduced the crude birth rate from 40.8 in 1951 to 26.4 in 1998, halved the infant mortality rate from 146 per 1,000 live births in 1951 to 72 per 1,000 live births in 1998.

The couple protection rate has quadrupled from 10.4 per cent in 1951 to 44 per cent in 1999 and life expectancy has risen to 62 years from 37 years.

A total of 42,000 babies are estimated to be born every day in India. Four women die from every 1,000 live births as a result of pregnancy and childbirth.

Reducing fertility is important not only because of its consequences for economic prosperity, but also because of the impact of high fertility in diminishing the freedom of people _ particularly young women _ to live the kind of lives that they have reason to value.