‘lndia’s population could top China’s’

Press, 11 January 1983, Page 21

‘lndia’s population could top China’s’

By

ADRIAN CROFT,

of Reuter, through NZPA India could overtake China as the world’s most populous country next century unless it steps up efforts to reduce its birth rate. This was the message from international experts who debated the population problems of India at a seminar in Oxford England, recently. They said that the population in India, about 684 million at the last census in 1981, was growing considerably faster than in China, where the head count had just topped one billion.

The Indian census showed the population had doubled since the Country gained independence fron Britain in 1947, and one Indian expert said it would double again in 32 years.

“The stresses and strains on the social, economic, political and sheer human aspects of life now felt to be reaching near breaking point,” said an Indian population expert, Avabai Wadia.

Mrs Wadia, head of the non-governmental Family Planning Association of India, called for intensfied efforts to check the population explosion. The latest United Nations statistics show India’s population surging ahead at 2.5 per cent a year, while China has managed to curb its growth rate to 1.4 per cent. China hopes to bring its population back to zero growth in the first 20 years of the next century. India set its sights on zero growth by 2050, hoping to stabilise the population at 1.2 billion. Experts said that India’s family-planning programme suffered a setback in 1977 when a reaction set in to forcible sterilisation during an internal emergency imposed by the Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi's Government, ousted after the emergency but now back in power, is trying to push the programme along, emphasising voluntary sterilisation and

wider choice of contraception.

Population and Government officials alike acknowledge that failure to control population would jeopardise advances made in food production and strain scarce resources of water and power. “All our efforts at education, health, employment, and above all housing are in vain against this sea of human beings,” said Mrs Gandhi last month. Experts at the seminar agreed that India had made great advances in controlling births since it became the first country to adopt family planning as’ part of Government policy in 1952.

However, some felt Government policy was too rigid and that official birth rate targets were out of touch with reality. Professor of Demography at the Australian National University in Canberra, John Caldwell, said that were was still resistance to birth control among the minority Muslim community in India. Professor Caldwell, who has conducted a three-year project in the southern Indian State of Karnataka, said, “There are strong pressures in the Muslim community against family planning. Muslim religious leaders will not let sterilised women come into their houses, and will not let them work for them.”

Professor Caldwell's study backed up the impression of other experts that there was a large divergence between theory and practice in India’s family-planning programme. Veena Soni, formerly of London’s Centre for Urban Studies, said that the Indian Government had not translated political commitment into urgent action, and consistently failed to attain its birth rate targets. Dr Soni said that the longterm target was to cut the birth rate from the present 3.5 per cent to 2.1 per cent by the year 2000. The present five-year plan envisages a rise in the proportion of couples using con-

traception from 23 per cent now to 37 per cent in 1985. Although the number' of sterilisations had risen from under one million in 1977 to 2.8 million last year, this was still far below the target of six million, Dr Soni said. In theory, all forms of contraception were available through health centres, but in practice the main method was still sterilisation, especially in rural areas. Dr Soni said that more emphasis was needed on helping young couples space out births. The intra-uterine device and the contraceptive pill had been badly neglected. Professor Caldwell said that in villages he studied.

birth control was almost always by sterislisation, mainly of women. The professor said that health workers felt villagers could not learn to use the pill, adding, “No pills have ever been taken there." Dr Soni was particularly critical of abortion facilities. Abortion has been legalised in India since 1971, but backstreet abortions are still estimated at between four million and six million a year, against only 400,000 legal abortions. “To my mind, it is a leading failure of the programme to cope with a human problem of immense proportions." Dr Sonj said.