An irrational draft population control Bill that must go

Context: On the wake of the recently announced draft Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021 (making a two-child norm a law, specifying various incentives and penalties), it is important to understand that evidence backs the principle of informed free choice.

Arguments against Uttar Pradesh’s coercive population control policies

• Against international convention and domestic policies:
  • The Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (UN 1994), to which India is a signatory, strongly avers that coercion, incentives and disincentives have little role to play in population stabilisation and need to be replaced by the principle of informed free choice.
  • The National Population Policy 2000 unequivocally supports a target-free approach and explicitly focuses on education, maternal and child health and survival, and availability of health-care services, including contraceptive services, as key strategies for population stabilisation.
• Question on the necessity of the policy: As population growth of India & Uttar Pradesh is already stabilising
  • The fertility rate for Uttar Pradesh (NFHS-4) is 2.7, compared to 3.8 10 years ago (NFHS-3).
  • This trend is correlated with improvements in health indicators for the State, such as infant mortality rate (IMR), maternal mortality ratio (MMR) and malnutrition, in the same period.
  • Many states already attained a replacement-level fertility rate of 2.1 by NFHS-4, such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, West Bengal.
• Development is the best population control policy: All states that attained replacement-level fertility rates have much better development indicators.
  • By NFHS-4, the child mortality rate in Uttar Pradesh is 78 compared to seven in Kerala and 27 in Tamil Nadu.
  • Women with 10 or more years of schooling stand at 33% in Uttar Pradesh compared to 72% in Kerala and 50% in Tamil Nadu.
• Impact on child sex ratio: It can be potentially disastrous in a society that has a high preference for male children, and Uttar Pradesh is amongst the worst across the Indian States, with lowest child sex ratio of 903 compared with 1,047 in Kerala and 954 in Tamil Nadu.
  • Recently China detracted from the one-child norm after experiencing a steep reduction in its child sex ratio.
• Social justice and equity concerns: Correlation between poor socioeconomic status and family size also impacts the potentially discriminatory effect of proposed measures upon communities that house the poorest of the poor, such as religious minorities and Dalits.
• Masking failure of State to provide contraceptive services:With an unmet contraceptive need of 18% in Uttar Pradesh as compared to 10% in Tamil Nadu.
• Human Rights violation in criminal sterilisation ‘camps’: Acknowledged by Supreme Court in Devika Biswas vs Union of India & Others case, 2012.
• Evolving ambits of paternal State: Evident that Government has no trust in ability of its citizens to take well-reasoned steps for their own welfare.