India – The Laureate Centre for History & Population

A colour image of a densely-packed crowd, just showing the tops of their heads. They are on a street between two buildings, with a pedestrian overpass going over the top of them. A small police station is visible to the right of the crowd. On the left is a store.

Calls for a ‘One-Child Policy’ in India are Misguided at best, and Dangerous at Worst

Posted on November 15, 2022January 3, 2024 by Admin in 8 Billion, Research

Aprajita Sarcar, UNSW Sydney and Joel Wing-Lun, UNSW Sydney. First published in the Conversation, 15 November 2022.

India will surpass China as the country with the world’s largest population in 2023, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 report.

The UN also projects the global population has reached eight billion as of Tuesday.

As early as March 2022, reports circulated on Chinese social media that India’s population had already surpassed China’s, though this was later dispelled by experts.

Women in India today are having fewer children than their mothers had. But despite a lower fertility rate, the country’s population is still growing.

The idea the country should adopt something like China’s former “one-child policy” has been moving from the fringe to the political mainstream.

But the notion that India should emulate China’s past population policies is misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.

Both countries are struggling with the legacy of harsh population policies, and stricter population controls in India could have disastrous consequences for women and minority communities.

Given Australia’s growing ties to India, it should be concerned about what population policy could mean for the erosion of democratic norms in India.

Unintended consequences

India implemented the world’s first national family planning program in 1952. The birthrate began to drop, but only gradually, and family sizes remained stubbornly high. The government then implemented widespread forced sterilisation particularly of Muslims and the urban poor, especially during “The Emergency” years of 1975-77.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, infant mortality dropped significantly. Between 1950 and 1980, China’s population almost doubled. The “one-child policy” – limiting births per couple through coercive measures – was implemented in the early 1980s, and fertility dropped dramatically.

In both India and China, these population policies had unintended consequences.

In China, the government found that once fertility rates dropped, they were faced with an ageing population. Even after relaxing birth control policies to allow all couples to have two children in 2015, and three children in 2021, birth rates remain low, particularly among the urban middle class favoured by the government.

In both countries, skewed sex ratios caused by sex selective abortions have led to a range of social problems, including forced marriages and human trafficking.

China has found that despite reversing course, it cannot undo this rapid demographic transition. Urban, middle-class couples face mounting financial pressure, including the cost of raising children and of caring for the elderly. While the government has encouraged “high quality” urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children.

As in China, in some states in India, women’s education and their aspirations for their children have contributed to lower birth rates. Like China, these states now face an ageing population. Birth rates in other states with high Muslim populations have also declined, but at a slower rate.

Unfair impact

Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations. These calls have less to do with demographic reality, and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist concerns around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility.

The worry here is that the coming population milestone will push India to adopt knee-jerk population policies. These could in turn unfairly affect women and minorities.

Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”. What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child. And in 2021, a senior government minister proposed a national “one-child” policy.

Like past population control policies, they’re targeted at Muslim and lower-caste families, and illustrate a broader Hindu nationalist agenda with anti-democratic tendencies.

As happened at the height of China’s one-child policy, Indians could lose government jobs and more if such laws were passed at the national level. Some Indian states and municipalities have already legislated that people with more than two children are ineligible for government jobs and to stand for political office.

The irony is that India’s birth rate and the size of families are decreasing because of women’s own reproductive choices. Many women are getting surgical contraception after having two children (or after having a son).

However, financial inducements for doctors and the women means poorer women are pressured to undergo these procedures.

In other words, the trend in India is towards smaller families already. As the 2022 UN report itself notes, no drastic intervention from the state is required.

Aprajita Sarcar, Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow, UNSW Sydney and Joel Wing-Lun, Lecturer in History and Asian Studies, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cover image by author.

A picture of a brick wall, taken from a newspaper. There is a large mural painted onto the wall, with two inverted red triangles. In between the two triangles is a family of four, with a man, woman and two children.

Painting the Perfect Family

Posted on September 8, 2021January 3, 2024 by Admin in Research

Aprajita Sarcar, 8 September 2021

The image you see was first published in April 1968. It appeared in a newsletter published by the Department of Family Planning, India. The department no longer exists and the newsletter died shortly after 1977. The image, along with the newsletter become artifacts of a nation, which was in the second decade of its independent existence. It also showcases a unique campaign advocating family planning.

Written in Hindi, the text reads ‘Two or Three Children are Enough; Listen to (your) Doctor’s advice.’ The figures that accompany the text show a family of four: a man, a woman, a boy and a girl (denoted by her plait).

As people ride a tonga (horse pulled carrier) next to the image, the photograph holds multiple meanings. Firstly, it showcases bureaucratic innovation. The image of a nuclear family was on a wall, and not a poster in a traditional sense. The image required people to look up and marvel at the scale of the painting and also the message within it. Secondly, the image is the first of many that populate the everyday life of a person. Be it cinema halls, bus stations, or rides on a tonga, chances of the inverted red triangle will grab your attention.

It is this campaign and its accompanying symbol that I trace in the archives. The campaign fascinated me because of its ubiquity. It seemed to seep into the national popular culture in ways that remain unique to the Indian family planning advocacy.

Unscrambling this image brings into focus its global layers, transnational linkages and the world that it envisions. This particular image captures not only the grandiose vision of a national campaign, but also how people made sense of it. I find this photograph to showcase a rare moment of clarity. I understand my work in its proper context: my work here is two-fold. I read into the image and its making, but I also make legible, the differing sentiments it invoked. I make sense of the worlds built within the red triangle and the family it encapsulates.

The side of a sandstone building on a street. Painted on the side of a building is a man and a woman, separated by an inverted red triangle. Three men are gathered to the side of the sign, two sitting, one standing.

What We’re Reading: QandA with Aprajita Sarcar

Posted on September 7, 2021January 3, 2024 by Admin in Research

Stephen Pascoe and Aprajita Sarcar, 7 September 2021 – Jump to QandA

Last month, the Laureate Centre Reading Group read the work of Aprajita Sarcar, a New Delhi–based scholar of population history in post-independence India. She is in the process of converting her doctoral research into her first monograph and she shared two samples of her work with us: a chapter from her recently-completed PhD and the introduction to her book-in-the-making.

Sarcar’s work begins with a captivating description of how the slogan “Hum Do Hamare Do” (“we two, our two”) – first developed in the postwar decades as a family planning campaign to limit reproduction to two children per family – has retained a “cultural currency” in contemporary India. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the slogan was accompanied by the symbol of an inverted red triangle, a powerful “synecdoche for the nuclear family”. This fascinating artefact of cultural history is the point of entry to Sarcar’s central purpose in this book: to show how the postcolonial state created the “psycho-social conditions and built environments for the modern nuclear family to prosper”. The innovation of Sarcar’s approach to population history emerges clearly in this introductory chapter. While population control has long been understood by historians as a crucial element of modern statecraft, it has overwhelmingly been viewed in top-down, or centrifugal modes. In this work, we see things from the other side: how population control came to be widely accepted by Indian public and intimately embedded in postcolonial popular culture: what Sarcar dubs a “vernacular neo-Malthusianism”. Moreover, she pays attention to not only the targets but also the local agents of population management. Whereas the history of family planning in India has heretofore focused on elite actors – the Nehrus and the Gandhis making pronouncements for the nation from on high – she brings to life the previously anonymous officials working in the middle-rung bureaucracies (sarkari daftars). These “mid-to-lower-level bureaucrats,” writes Sarcar, “translated the logic, need and rationale for a planned family for the Indian populace”.

In Chapter 1, Sarcar provides a fascinating account of the role of family planning centres in the Indian capital in counselling new couples, as the postcolonial Indian state attempted to limit population growth. As Sarcar demonstrates compellingly, overpopulation was understood by state officials as the primary social problem in 1950s India, from which all other problems (such as malnourishment, overcrowded housing, and illiteracy) emanated. Recent improvements in income and health meant that Indian citizens were living longer; however, the associated problems of unchecked population growth, it was feared, would erode these gains in standards of living. Hence the enthusiasm for neo-Malthusianism as a nation-building project of first-order priority.

Methodologically, this work makes splendid use of previously underutilised archives of differing scale: from local municipal archives to those of transnational organisations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. This allows Sarcar to slide between scales of analysis and bring “the local and the global” into meaningful conversation: a task to which lip service is so often paid, but which is rarely achieved satisfactorily. The result is a richly textured social and cultural history of population which demonstrates how the work of population control seeped into the popular culture of post-Independence India.

Q. and A. with Stephen Pascoe:

In your analysis of the urban geography of postcolonial Delhi, you argue that “differing moral economies of governance” were applied across three distinctive spatialities: (1) New Delhi, “the privileged child of empire”, imagined as populated by model middle-class nuclear families; (2) Old Delhi, “the illegitimate older sibling”, inhabited by poorer, predominantly Muslim residents who were disproportionately targeted for sterilisation programs; and (3) the peri-urban zone of “urbanizing villages” which were seen as ripe for developmentalist intervention.

I am curious to know more about the intersection of class and religious identity. You write that middle-class Indians most enthusiastically embraced targeted sterilizations of lower-class peoples. How did this class attitude intersect with religious community, especially among minority communities? For instance, what of middle-class Muslims? Was there are sense of loyalty to one’s sect trumping enthusiasm for population control?

Before responding to the question, I would like to clarify my use of the terms ‘family planning’ and population control. I see family planning as an individual family’s decision to space births, use contraceptives and consciously curtail family size. Population control, on the other hand, is the state advocacy measures that include incentives for contraception and sterilizations. In the early decades of the 1950s-60s, I believe there is sufficient archival evidence to show that people were enthusiastic about family planning. They understood the postcolonial state’s attempts to link family size to economic productivity of the nation. This linkage was secular and I found no resistance on religious lines in the archival material I unearthed. For instance, an article from December 1967 showed the Shahi Imam from Jama Masjid (a prominent Muslim cleric) spoke to a large male audience to encourage them to use contraceptives.

But by the late 1960s, I see an ambiguity creep in, as to how individuals accessed contraceptives. Again, it is important to mention that people were doubtful about the efficacy of the various contraceptives available, and not about the need for population control. In the early years of the 1970s, there were drastic shifts in the way large families were linked to specific communities. Scholars have shown how transnational funders, who wanted to see a major dip in birth rates, may have pushed the national programmes towards harsher measures of population control around this time. This rushed advocacy pushed for long-term sterilizations as a poverty removal measure. In this frenzy to curtail birth rates, we see the first discussions on high Muslim fertility. A similar line of editorials and commentaries in newspapers linked large families to subaltern populations. In fact, I believe even in the discussions about saffron demography today, we see large families as symptoms of poverty and illiteracy, as if reducing family size would automatically and immediately translate to capital gains for the community. So now we have a situation wherein upper caste Hindu nuclear families see themselves as ideal citizens and blame high fertility on communities who do not share their historical location.

In our reading group discussion, there was an interesting conversation on how best to understand Malthusianism in twentieth century India, and how bureaucrats absorbed and promoted what you call “vernacular neo-Malthusianism”. Could you expand on that here? How do “Malthusian” ideas get translated from Malthus’ writings to a framework of government policy?

This response will be a slightly disappointing as I am still thinking through this discussion. Through scholarship on birth control debates in late colonial India, we know that a section of elite Indians were reading Malthus. Annie Besant was based in India. Her advocacy for contraception did not wither away when she started supporting Indian voices for self rule. She brought those conversations with her to the independence movement. Educated, upper class Indian intelligentsia invited Margaret Sanger and other birth control advocates to speak to political leaders in the country. However, the lines of influence get murkier in the post-Independence scenario. We have a national bureaucracy welded to the idea that birth rates need to be curtailed in order for the national income to go up. Were the middle and lower-rung bureaucrats aware that this logic came from a text written in 1798? I don’t think so. However, the fact that a link existed cannot be denied. I am therefore proposing that Malthusian ideas of population growth, of linking fertility to material prosperity, became vernacularized. These ideas were translated in different contexts and reached the postcolonial political geography in India in ways Malthus may or may not have imagined. Studying the municipal or city-level governance of family planning advocacy in Delhi from 1950s to 70s helps me unearth this localized interpretation of Malthusian ideas.

You also mentioned in our discussion that “age” is controversial as a category in census-taking in India. Could you explain why?

There has been some work on the early enumeration practices for censuses. Sumit Guha has shown that census taking as a modern state practice borrowed from earlier traditions of documenting age, occupation and family histories. The process of documentation was more complex than a simple teleological affair. Ishita Pande in her work on child marriages in colonial India shows how contentious age as a category was to determine consensual sex or even forced marriages of young girls. Social technologies like the census, or a law to curb child marriages depend on the biological grounds of the ‘correct’ age of a person, as against a fluid concept with astrological determinants. This friction between a modern concept of age and a more translucent one which relies on social roles (or planetary positions) made census taking a contentious act.