Population bogey up’s new policy and draft bill are conceptually weak & disruptive no good can come of them

Population bogey up’s new policy and draft bill are conceptually weak & disruptive no good can come of them

UP’s population policy for 2021-30 unveiled by CM Yogi Adityanath wants to incentivise couples to stick to a two-child norm. It’s an idea whose time has long gone. The past decade has witnessed a sharp fall in India’s total fertility rates, even in UP, India’s most populous state. NFHS-4 data from 2015-16 indicates UP’s TFR fell to 2.7 in 2015-16 from 3.8 ten years prior. Sample Registration System report for 2018 pegged UP’s TFR slightly higher at 2.9 in 2018 but even this was a fall of 23.1% in a decade, bettering the national TFR decline of 18.5%.

Falling TFRs are massive demographic changes catalysed by education of girls, economic growth, migration, falling infant mortality rates and higher institutional births. All happened without drastic population control policies. By all indications, UP will also hit replacement TFR levels of 2.1 in due course like other states.

Apart from being unnecessary, the approach taken by the UP Law Commission’s draft Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill is also dangerous. It has prescriptions portending a bureaucratic nightmare for ordinary citizens, especially the poor. It requires devoting energies to identifying state employees and the general public who qualify for a raft of special incentives. Disincentives barring access to welfare schemes and even the PDS for larger families, though not retrospective, poses exclusion risks, massive corruption and social discrimination.

Badly conceived laws which trust bureaucracy with inordinate control over people’s lives are a recipe for disaster. Ironically, the poor, and especially UP’s rural areas where TFR is 3.0 against 2.1 in cities, will be penalised for structural deficiencies in schooling, public healthcare, and employment opportunities. The potential for widespread social disruption can even undermine any political gains Adityanath may expect in the UP assembly polls from the draft bill’s ample references to polygamy. UP should junk this idea.