India’s foremost demographer, Ashish Bose, explains how India ended up with the world’s largest population despite 60 years of family planning. Excerpts of an interview with Sheela Reddy:
You have been involved with population issues from the start—why do you think we have failed so abysmally?
Family planning as a state-sponsored programme began in India as early as 1951 in the very first five-year plan. But in those days, nobody took the subject seriously, they didn’t even know what demographer meant—until Sanjay Gandhi came and did the wrong things.
Sanjay Gandhi was not only a bully, but a badmaash. He triggered off mischief by asking the chief ministers of north India to show progress in the family planning programme, as if it’s a cement or steel company. These CMs assumed he would be the future prime minister and they ended up putting up their own targets and their own achievements on paper, cooking up statistics. Because of him, subsequent governments became afraid to handle the issue—they used to say, ‘Maar khayenge’.
Was there anything to the widespread rumour that men were caught and forcibly sterilised during the Emergency?
In certain parts of Haryana, yes. The then CM of Haryana, Bansi Lal, was the No. 1 chela of Sanjay, so authorities there caught hold of men on the streets and said, ‘Chalo, nasbandi karo’.
But, surely, Sanjay Gandhi wasn’t the only reason why the family planning programme did not work over 60 years?
There are several factors—one is the massive Indian inertia: nothing changes very fast, particularly in matters of sex and marriage. Two, the fact that it was a state-sponsored programme, which means the bureaucracy ran it. But they didn’t know the rules to follow to evaluate this programme as there were no precedents. Third, the American lobby was interested in having a breakthrough in India somehow. They held up Kerala as a model, which was a big mistake.
But Kerala was a good model, considering its zero population growth?
There is no fixed formula, each state has to follow its own strategy. There are a multitude of factors to consider, like education and urbanisation. It makes economic sense in urban areas to have less children but not in rural areas. Then, people are not the same in north and south India—in the south, they are better educated, more disciplined and the FP succeeded. But Kerala is a total anomaly—it’s neither rural nor urban.
According to you, the many doomsayers about population explosion were wrong?
The term population explosion is over-exaggerated. My stand has always been that development is the best contraceptive. People are not fools that they will go on producing six children if there is hope that their children can get better education and jobs. The same foreign experts who predicted a population explosion now say that India is great because of the demographic dividend. This is again an exaggeration—we have millions of young people without wives, without jobs. I don’t buy either: demographic dividend or population explosion.
Did you come up with any concrete plan for curbing population growth?
I explained to Rajiv Gandhi that he had to reformulate his strategy. I told him to forget foreign experts’ models and focus only on the four states with the largest population and area—the BIMARU states. Development there is the key—health, education, literacy, everything. He agreed and put me on a high-powered committee monitoring the 20-point programme. I produced a note saying that the main problem is the bureaucracy cooking up data to meet their targets. As a result, targets were out. Instead, these four states were given a package of health and development programmes that was intended to curb population growth. But Rajiv Gandhi was killed before this plan began to have an impact. After that nothing much happened until Manmohan Singh launched his national rural health mission. He listed 18 high-focus states which included the original four bimaru states (now grown to seven), and all of the northeastern states and two hill states. But I don’t buy this approach: if you want to make a dent in population growth, you don’t care what happens in Nagaland or Mizoram, because these are very small. It’s all mixed up—he supports the idea of bimaru states but adds his own political list.
