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.
Arguments against the draft UP population Bill:
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