Road to demographic distress

Context: Draft UP population bill will be counterproductive, alienate youth and poor.

About the Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021

• The overall objective of the proposed law is the welfare of the people of the state by promoting the two-child norm. Assam has embarked on a similar policy recently; 
• While the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) indicate that family size has declined considerably across states, its Draft still aims to bring down the growth of population as, despite a decline in fertility, the population keeps growing. Demographers call this the “population momentum”.
  • Unlike in the past, the population is growing not because couples have more children but because we have many more young couples today.

• Carrot and Stick Policy: 
  • On the one hand, it aims to regulate the whole ambit of government benefits, including government jobs, development schemes and access to rations.
  • On the other, the Draft proposes to use sterilisation operations, tubectomy or vasectomy.
• Issues with forced sterilisation:
  • Lack of Aseptic conditions: Millions of couples would have to go through compromised sterilisations.
  • UP could end up facing the contradiction of low fertility and high birth rates, and an overall higher population.
    •  Since a sterilisation certificate will be the only way to ensure access to government benefits, these couples would have their two children in quick succession followed by a sterilisation operation.
    • If, instead, they opted for spacing and their children were born over a longer period, the population growth rate would be slower.
• It is based on the faulty argument that population control will increase the natural resource base.
  • On the contrary, the rich consume far more natural resources and contribute much more to greenhouse gas emissions than the poor, whose numbers such laws often aim to control.
• Discriminates against the youth: To qualify as the “third child”, it will have to be born one year after the notification of the law.
  •  All couples with three or more children, who have completed their reproductive lives, will not fall under the ambit of the law. The law discriminates against the youth.
  • UP is a young state — a third of its population belongs to the youth. The law proposes to potentially exclude them from government jobs, schemes and subsidies