India Turns to Sterilization
D'MONTE, DARRYL
THE FAILURE OF FAMILY PLANNING India Turns to Sterilization BY DARRYL D'MONTE Bombay Frustrated by its inability to feed a rapidly growing population with a comparatively static food supply,...
...India, the second most populous nation in the world with 605 million inhabitants, adds some 12 million to its numbers each year...
...If disincentives have had too little effect, the turn to compulsory sterilization seems nevertheless an act of despair on the part of family planning authorities, who have never been able to achieve their goals...
...In many ways, the IUD is ideally suited to Indian conditions: It is cheap, easy to use and non-permanent...
...The government then stepped in and began to spread the message of birth control far and wide...
...Only a doctor who has built up a professional relationship can give such guidance...
...are the ones with the lowest birth rates...
...Gandhi however, had said publicly...
...In both the U.S...
...THE FAILURE OF FAMILY PLANNING India Turns to Sterilization BY DARRYL D'MONTE Bombay Frustrated by its inability to feed a rapidly growing population with a comparatively static food supply, India appears ready to resort to a desperate measure...
...As Western history has demonstrated, not until people's material standards are raised do they stop producing children...
...On an international scale as well, it is the affluent countries (aided and abetted by organizations like the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the Internationa...
...there are no shortcuts...
...She later went on record as saying mandatory sterilization was "a bit too drastic," but added that New Delhi wouldn't stand in the way of any states that wanted to punish "errant" couples...
...The number of female sterilizations, on the other hand, increased from 570.000 to 750,000 durins the same period, a three-day hospitalization notwithstanding...
...Many are poorly staffed, for doctors prefer to practice in the city, or migrate to Britain or the U.S...
...Planned Parenthood Federation) who preach population control to the poor nations...
...As Health Minister Karan Singh himself said at a Bucharest conference in 1974: "Development is the best contraceptive...
...The needs of the countryside, in particular, have been virtually ignored...
...From the late '60s to the present day, the emphasis has been solely on sterilization, because of its final, "no-nonsense" approach...
...It was a "hit and miss" affair, though, and neither high-pressure salesmanship nor the free distribution of condoms at local railway stations could turn it into a success...
...This despite the fact that the birth control program launched here in 1952 remains the world's largest in terms of personnel and expenditure...
...in Europe, 20...
...overpopulation only results from this situation...
...In Maharashtra, where the most aggressive family planning campaign in the country has long been under way, the law would require one member of a couple to be sterilized within 180 days of the birth of a third child...
...Talk of forced sterilization had been in the air for quite a while, yet most people saw it as an empty threat that could not be enforced...
...In their eagerness to meet impossible targets, local authorities have resorted to coercion...
...Soon even the remotest hamlet in the country was familiar with the lal tikon, the inverted red triangle that is the campaign's symbol...
...cation and food rations, may also be withdrawn...
...India has since set up its own factory in Kerala...
...Uttar Pradesh proposes to jail fathers refusing sterilization after the third child, and then sterilize them...
...New Delhi subsequently advocated the use of intrauterine devices...
...an increase itself equivalent to the population of Australia...
...A study of a south Indian village near Madras by two Swedish sociologists, Goran Djurfeldt and Staffan Lindberg, has similarly noted the brutally dehumanizing aspects of family planning and sterilization: "In other countries sterilization has only been used on a large scale with animals and mental patients...
...His only way out, he explained to Mamdani, was to produce more and more children...
...But the unhappy reality is that it has never properly been developed into a truly mass-oriented campaign...
...The rate in America is 14...
...This ran into the problem that a mere 18 per cent of India's women are literate, and the plan was given up as too ambitious...
...The authorities next toyed with the idea of putting women on the pill (at subsidized rates...
...the right to live, the right to progress...
...and the USSR, the birth rate was more than 50 per 1,000 in the 19th century, and dropped sharply as industrialization progressed...
...It would apply to all men under 55 years of age and women below 45, with violators subject to two-year prison terms...
...aid from Japan and South Korea...
...Women, in particular, need to be counseled over a period of time about proper contraceptive methods, how children can be spaced out, and so on...
...In addition, since this community was in the Green Revolution belt, the arrival of sophisticated technology had driven most landless residents into desperate straits...
...there were only 600,000 in 1974-75...
...Perhaps more important than the inadequacies of India's family planning program, however, is the fact that few people here question the basic premise that population growth is the cause of all India's difficulties...
...But because of the lack of follow-up health services, many women fitted with loops later suffered complications...
...The net result of India's massive population control effort has been a drop in the birth rate from 42 per 1,000 in 1961 to 35 per 1,000 now...
...The slogan Do Ya Teen Bus???Two or Three is Enough...
...Initially, the project was run by volunteer social workers, mainly middle-class women who considered family planning a means of emancipation...
...Each volunteer received about $3 for his pains...
...We must not hesitate to take drastic steps...
...Family planners had hoped it would fall by one each year...
...As much as $600 million has already been spent on the effort...
...In the first phase of the program, too, the government tried to promote the use of condoms, bought with U.S...
...Enthusiasm for mass camps faltered once reports began to circulate that wives of the participating men had become pregnant...
...experts blamed illiteracy, ignorance and superstition...
...Compared to 1.6 million volunteers in 1971-72...
...In India, too, the three most prosperous states...
...Until this year, no one seriously believed the central government would ever approve such an extreme policy...
...The volunteers had been coaxed from their distant villages with the promise of $13 each in cash and gifts, and each patient was sent straight home immediately following his few minutes on the operating table...
...They have become alienated from the masses and every kind of myth about contraception has spread...
...Third-world countries like Taiwan and South Korea have been able to control their populations not because of family planning campaigns, but because of rapid economic progress (with US aid), which has provided jobs and raised the average age of marriage...
...Only the Moslem and Christian minorities have registered strong disapproval in the state assemblies taking up the issue...
...In any event, a general, albeit false fear that vasectomies cause impotence has led to a steady decline in the number of those undergoing the operation...
...Punjab and Haryana, in the cradle of the Green Revolution, and industrial Maharashtra...
...The assemblies of the states of Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab are now on the verge of passing laws instituting the procedure and harshly penalizing families having more than three children...
...most Indians can't afford to pay the dollar a month's supply costs...
...was daubed across walls and trees in nearly all of India's 500,000 villages...
...Complaints spread like wildfire and the IUD was doomed...
...When the birth rate didn't fall there, U.S...
...There are only 5,200 primary health centers dotted around the country???each catering to 120,000 people...
...After all, the norm...
...One 60-year-old man died from infection...
...In Bombay, where there has always been a hard-sell family planning service, monetary incentives were also initiated and old buses were converted into mobile operating rooms...
...Newspaper reports told recently of an eight-day campaign in Barsi, a small Maharashtra town, where several people were picked up, taken to a clinic and forcibly sterilized...
...This has given it the flavor of a partisan communal matter since chauvinistic Hindus, who in cooler moments would be much less enthusiastic, have countered by championing the trend...
...India will ultimately have to learn that economic growth comes only through hard work and social reforms...
...In a classic case a couple of years ago, when the voluntary sterilization program was at its peak, some 60,000 men were vasectomized at a mass camp in Ernakulam, Kerala...
...Certain privileges enjoyed by government employees, including car, scooter and housing loans, free eduDarryl D'Monte is the assistant editor of the Times of India...
...Significantly, they have been pushing for compulsory sterilization the hardest...
...They scoured the city???particularly the slums...
...The authors argue that the Indian birth-control campaign is essentially the imposition of an urban middle class standard upon the rural poor...
...For the impoverished and undernourished, there is no guarantee even one will survive...
...Again, the absence of village health facilities made it impossible to check on whether the operations had in fact been successful...
...Indeed, the entire notion of limiting other people's families is an assertion of the haves over the have-nots...
...We must act decisively and bring down the birth rate speedily...
...Surprisingly, there has been little outcry against these developments here...
...Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance for the human right of the nation...
...The local blacksmith, who had inherited his trade from his father, was now destitute because the use of tractors demanded new skills he didn't possess, and no one wanted their plows repaired any longer...
...Abortions, incidentally, have been virtually legalized (one of the grounds for elegibility is "failure of contraceptive device"), but since adequate facilities are very scarce thousands of women must continue to go to quacks...
...and demographers darkly estimate that the billion mark will be reached by the turn of the century...
...three children ??”should only apply to those who are certain their children will live...
...Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's home state, has just introduced such legislation as well...
...so did the promoter who urged him in and the surgeon who performed the vasectomy...
...Following the recent moves to evict beggars from the city, newspapers reported that many of them had been sterilized more than once as doctors and staff made fortunes cooking up fake "patients...
...compulsory sterilization...
...Reproducing was their one possible response to their predicament: The infant mortality rate was very high, and their children who did live brought in income and did household chores, more than compensating for the little they consumed...
...Still, it was thought that states would confine themselves to "disincentives," like hiring only people who have fewer than three children for government jobs...
...looking for victims...
...Some time later, the author interviewed the same villagers and found that it was actually in their interests to have many children...
...A Harvard-educated Ugandan, Mahmood Mamdani, has written a book, The Myth of Family Planning, in which he suggests that the high birth rate is itself only a symptom of the country's problems, Mamdani's study involved a Rockefeller-funded family planning project in a Punjab village...
...Family planning officials here, unfortunately, generally make flying visits in vans...
...The failure to tackle the problem at its roots has led to the recent demand for drastic measures...
...Family planning cannot and should not be an objective in itself...
...Civil servants in Haryana, for example, stand to be sacked if they have a third...
...Under such adverse conditions, it is not surprising that few villagers have gone in for birth control...
...In Sweden, a man is forbidden from having himself sterilized...
...And this failure can be directly ascribed to the lack of a truly comprehensive health network, a sine qua non for family planning...
...In the end, it would appear that the problem really revolves around underdevelopment and deprivation...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 10
