12-Dec-2020: Not in favour of imposing family planning, government tells Supreme Court

A petition was filed in the Supreme Court (SC) by an advocate stating the need for a population control law.

The petition highlighted the banes of population explosion, it further went on to state that without a population controlling legislation, the dream of Healthy India, Prosperous India, Clean India, Crime-free India won’t be a reality.

Government’s response

• The government made the SC know that it had no plans of imposing mandatory family planning measures.
• The government stated that pressurizing couples to have a specific number of children is not part of their plans to limit population explosion.

Voluntary nature

• India’s family planning exercises so far have been based on voluntary actions of the individuals, as against the ‘One child policy’ of China, which has been slightly relaxed now.
• India’s programme has placed autonomy of the couples at the centre of the policy, allowing the couples to have a say in the size of the family they wish to have.
• India is also a party to the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, which categorically decries coercion as a means to family planning.

What do the statistics say?

• The census statistics of 2001-2011 give a sense of optimism, it happened to be the first decade in the last 100 years that added less population from the decade preceding it.
• The particular decade witnessed the sharpest decline in the decadal growth rate of the Indian population in 100 years.
• The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) which refers to the number of children that would be born per woman (or per 1,000 women) if she/they were to pass through the childbearing years bearing children according to a current schedule of age-specific fertility rates has been declining.
• The NFHS survey – 4 is only 1.8, indicating that couples do not want to have more than 2 offspring.