Reversing family planning: Mohan Bhagwat's three-child idea is regressive

India can take pride in the fact that the country has achieved a drop in the total fertility rate (TFR) from a high over five births per woman in 1965 to 2.01 in 2022 without the draconian civil-rights abuses (bar the 21 months of the Emergency) that were imposed on China for 36 years with its one-child policy. A falling TFR is not, of course, unalloyed good news for the world’s most populous country since it implies that India’s TFR is below the replacement rate of 2.1. By 2050, if a study by Lancet is to be believed, the country’s TFR is dipping irreversibly to 1.29, suggesting that India may grow old before it grows rich. There are many approaches to coping with this demographic future, including bolstering health care, training the workforce appropriately, and tweaking insurance products, as western economies have done. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat’s solution of a three-child norm, recently spelt out, should not figure among the demographic coping mechanisms.

 

Significantly, Mr Bhagwat’s assertion, made at an assembly in Nagpur, are a reversal of his emphatic calls for population control just two years ago, his exhortation then being an elliptical reference to disparities in the TFR between Hindus and Muslims. Now, with the growth rate of the population falling and India facing the prospect of demographic stagnation, he sees an encompassing societal danger to the nation. Encouraging a population expansion may appear to be an easy solution to accelerate growth. Certain Scandinavian nations and other European countries, which have been suffering falling population growth for decades, offer child care incentives to families. But these countries have reached a degree of socio-economic progress and administrative efficiency that enable such policies to achieve demographic aims without being socially regressive (equal paternity leave being one example). In a country as unequal as India, where welfare delivery is uneven and inefficient, a three-child norm would be fraught with pitfalls.

 

Unchecked population growth will undo the societal gains India has made since independence. For one, such a policy militates against women’s rights, since the burden of having children and looking after them will fall disproportionately, as it does even today, on women. It will erase at one stroke all the fragile gains women have made in entering the cohorts of higher education, offices, and shop-floors. Women from poorer, more conservative families are likely to bear the brunt of such a norm. India’s low female-labour participation rate at 37 per cent has long been cause for concern; burdening women, who have been at the forefront of the move towards smaller families, is unlikely to improve this critical dynamic. In Andhra Pradesh, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu scrapped the two-child restriction on those contesting local-body elections and is considering incentivising larger families. Telangana is likely to emulate its eastern neighbour.

 

The southern states (Tamil Nadu and Kerala included) may have legitimate concerns that their progressive moves towards population control will militate against them when it comes to Finance-Commission awards and in diminishing representation in Parliament following a delimitation exercise. These apprehensions may not be entirely misplaced, and urgently demand addressing at policy level so that the demographic windfall in these states becomes a role model for the poorer, more populated states in the Hindi heartland. Encouraging larger families would amount to a giant step back. Instead, states paying more attention to strengthening education and health care across the country should be the preferred path.