The horrors of India’s population control programmes

12 November, 2014

On 8 November, 83 women attended a sterilisation camp in Takhatpur, in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district. Over the next two days, 13 of those women died and 20 were hospitalised with serious infections, a tragedy that should turn a spotlight on the Indian government’s regressive approach to family planning and population control. In our November 2014 issue, Ruhi Kandhari examines the history of India’s population control programmes in her commentary piece, ‘Demography Now.’

Kandhari notes that:

In June this year, less than a month after taking office, the union health minister Harsh Vardhan declared in an interview to the Deccan Chronicle that “population stabilisation” was high on his agenda. In another interview around two months later to the same paper, Vardhan elaborated on his plans: he intends to revive a controversial draft bill from 1992, which would disqualify anyone with more than two children from membership to parliament or legislative assemblies.

Vardhan is no longer the health minister, but if his statements are in line with the government’s approach to population control, we should worry. Kandhari writes:

The debate on how policymakers should treat the question of population control is broadly split along two lines. In a 1995 essay, titled “Population Policy: Authoritarianism versus Cooperation,” the economist Amartya Sen described these two contrasting approaches in terms of an eighteenth-century dispute between the French mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet, and the English scholar Thomas Malthus. Both felt that population growth was a grave problem; but while Condorcet believed it could be addressed through the “progress of reason,” and by increasing people’s freedom to make decisions, Malthus had no such faith in humankind, believing that populations would tend to grow unless reduced by “preventive checks” such as abstinence, or “positive checks,” such as war, disease and other catastrophes. Sen noted that this scepticism about people’s “ability to make sensible decisions about fertility … led Malthus to oppose the public relief of poverty” as he believed that it encouraged population growth.

In India, Kandhari notes, the best known measures of population control have stemmed from a Malthusian understanding of the problem. And the most widespread method adopted has been that of tubectomy, or female sterilisation. As was the case in Takhatpur, the government’s record in implementing these programmes has been appalling. A 2012 public interest litigation, currently being heard, asserts that in holding these sterilisation camps, many states violated established laws on screening, counseling and treating women during sterilisations. Kandhari writes that the PIL cites research describing

filthy “camps” in Rajasthan (the first state to adopt the two-child norm, in 1992) where sterilisation surgeries were conducted on women at a breakneck pace to meet targets set by the state. One doctor sterilised 72 women in one day at Kolayat Hospital in Bikaner district on 23 May 2012, despite a prescribed regulatory limit of 30. According to research from the state’s Bundi district, 88 percent of women were not informed about the likelihood of failure, complications and side effects after sterilisation; 42 percent of the women were not told that sterilisation is permanent. Overall, around 60 percent of women were unaware that sterilisation surgery can cause complications and, in some cases, death.

In Bihar, Kandhari writes, according to the petition,

in January 2012, 53 poor women were operated upon by one doctor at Kaparfora Government Middle School in the state’s Araria district at night under torchlight within two hours. The doctor did not wash hands, change gloves, or wear a surgical gown and cap during the surgeries, and NGO workers placed the women on straw paddy. When the camp concluded, three women were left with heavy bleeding.

India’s family planning programmes also violate its international commitments, as well as its own landmark National Population Policy of 2000, Kandhari writes. Read the piece in full here.