Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Coercive Population Control
‘Targeting’ the Poor?
At a recent workshop on population, health and gender issues organised by the Press Institute of India with the Population Council, the Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary, Mr PK Hota, proclaimed that the biggest challenge to the success of population and health issues is the implementation by States, health being a State subject (see “Population control: implementation is the challenge” in The Hindu, 7th April 2005). His words have been proved true in a deeply ironic sense, by a recent policy initiative in Maharashtra seeking to coerce banana and sugar farmers in the state into having no more than two children by denying them access to water for irrigation if they do.
Mr Ajit Pawar, the Maharashtra’s Water Minister and nephew of Union Agriculture Minister Mr Sharad Pawar, is the chief architect of this controversial policy that has led to protests from both the ruling NCP as well as the opposition Shiv Sena. The bill has been passed in the upper house of the State Assembly, but dissent across the political spectrum is gathering steam as the lower house prepares to consider it. It comes with the harsh addendum that all banana and sugar cane farmers, regardless of child numbers, are required use drip or sprinkling systems of irrigation within five year or lose their supply.
Apart from having a direct adverse impact on the welfare of the poorest farmers in the state, who are statistically most likely to have larger families, this policy initiative resurrects the spectre of coercive disincentives for population control that haunted Indian politics during the times of Sanjay Gandhi. The implementation of this anti-poor policy will push Maharashtra into the company of Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan- all States that are following the two-child norm with disastrous consequences, according to the recent population workshop. The two-child norm itself has been derived from the one-child norm of China. However the extent to which the slowing of population growth in China is solely the result of the success of this policy is unclear. For example, a number of experts have posited that the decline in the population growth rate took place before the one-child norm was introduced.
While Maharashtra is agriculturally one of India’s most advanced States, it has been suffering from a series of droughts in recent years, as indeed have other parts of the country. Water shortages for irrigation and consequent crop failure at least partially explain the spate of farmer suicides that have been observed in this region. In such water-insecure context, what are the economic and ethical grounds for forcible intervention by the government in the rate of population growth?
The philosophical roots of coercive population control measures stretch back in time to arguments by Malthus, who propounded in his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principles of Population’ that the excess of the rate of growth of population over the rate of growth of food production would inevitably lead to compounded economic misery unless some proactive steps were taken to avert this looming disaster. Malthus’s seminal work indirectly attempted to explain the nature and origins of poverty in a way that would suggest that there was no viable alternative to capitalism, and more insidiously, “sought to defend the interests of capital in the face of the enormous human misery which capitalism causes”, according to Eric Ross, population expert at the ISS, The Hague. Interestingly, Malthus himself retracted his earlier views on the need for coercive control in a revised version of his paper published in 1803, wherein he proposed that ‘positive controls’ were more likely to succeed.
Today, the burgeoning evidence from population studies suggests that family planning and positive incentives are among the only policy tools that are consistent with the widely accepted conceptualisation of development in terms of capabilities and freedom, a la Amartya Sen and the Human Development Index. Coercive measures have no place in such an analytical and policy framework. This is as true of the Indian context as anywhere else, and as Mr Abhijit Das of Sahayog argued, a two-child norm has the potential to cause immense harm to women's health in the existing social situation where preference for male children is high and women's status is low.
The economic rationale underlying the irrigation-linked population control measure is also dubious. A number of experts have posited that the poor are more likely to have larger families because they lack adequate access to labour markets and their children are also a source of income and security in old age. In this context economist Nancy Birdsall, for example argues that the poor value these instrumental attributes of their children much more than the rich, and hence, “it is easy to imagine a tax forcing a peasant to forgo the birth of a child whose financial security value alone is much greater than the tax”- the ‘tax’ in this case being the restrictions on water use.
More generally, such attempts to penalise the poor for their second-best strategies to overcome labour market failures do not only perpetuate the unequal income distribution structure that is commonly observed in rural India (and indeed between urban and rural India), but a number of implementation hurdles are likely to lead to poor results in terms of efficiency goals too. One seriously problematic example of this is the lack of state capacity to ensure effective targeting. Additionally, there has been no discussion of the possibility that lower fertility rates resulting from this doctrinaire initiative could lead to instability in agricultural yields in the long term or stronger impulses to rural-urban migration of farm labour (with accompanying deleterious effects on urban unemployment and poverty).
In the light of all the evidence at hand, it can be safely claimed that Mr Pawar’s population control policy reflects a backward step in a State that has otherwise made remarkable strides in poverty alleviation and rural development- a case in point being the Employment Guarantee Scheme, where Maharashtra has been no less than a trailblazer. Ironically, given that both the Congress and NCP have their stronghold in rural Maharashtra and their MLAs know that it may be political suicide to back the bill in its current form, it is possible that the bill may not be passed or even if passed may not survive long.
Unfortunately the lesson that policymakers such as Mr Pawar will perhaps fail to take away from this experience is that it is not high fertility rates, per se, that are responsible for a host of barriers faced by the poor in India today. Rather, as population expert Robert Cassen argues, the economy has failed to deliver the correlates of declining fertility, which include better health, education and employment prospects for the marginalised classes in rural India. The Malthusian argument that the government can constrain, at will, the rights of the rural poor in order to maintain balance in a system characterised by absurd income inequalities is untenable in a political democracy such as India.
At a recent workshop on population, health and gender issues organised by the Press Institute of India with the Population Council, the Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary, Mr PK Hota, proclaimed that the biggest challenge to the success of population and health issues is the implementation by States, health being a State subject (see “Population control: implementation is the challenge” in The Hindu, 7th April 2005). His words have been proved true in a deeply ironic sense, by a recent policy initiative in Maharashtra seeking to coerce banana and sugar farmers in the state into having no more than two children by denying them access to water for irrigation if they do.
Mr Ajit Pawar, the Maharashtra’s Water Minister and nephew of Union Agriculture Minister Mr Sharad Pawar, is the chief architect of this controversial policy that has led to protests from both the ruling NCP as well as the opposition Shiv Sena. The bill has been passed in the upper house of the State Assembly, but dissent across the political spectrum is gathering steam as the lower house prepares to consider it. It comes with the harsh addendum that all banana and sugar cane farmers, regardless of child numbers, are required use drip or sprinkling systems of irrigation within five year or lose their supply.
Apart from having a direct adverse impact on the welfare of the poorest farmers in the state, who are statistically most likely to have larger families, this policy initiative resurrects the spectre of coercive disincentives for population control that haunted Indian politics during the times of Sanjay Gandhi. The implementation of this anti-poor policy will push Maharashtra into the company of Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan- all States that are following the two-child norm with disastrous consequences, according to the recent population workshop. The two-child norm itself has been derived from the one-child norm of China. However the extent to which the slowing of population growth in China is solely the result of the success of this policy is unclear. For example, a number of experts have posited that the decline in the population growth rate took place before the one-child norm was introduced.
While Maharashtra is agriculturally one of India’s most advanced States, it has been suffering from a series of droughts in recent years, as indeed have other parts of the country. Water shortages for irrigation and consequent crop failure at least partially explain the spate of farmer suicides that have been observed in this region. In such water-insecure context, what are the economic and ethical grounds for forcible intervention by the government in the rate of population growth?
The philosophical roots of coercive population control measures stretch back in time to arguments by Malthus, who propounded in his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principles of Population’ that the excess of the rate of growth of population over the rate of growth of food production would inevitably lead to compounded economic misery unless some proactive steps were taken to avert this looming disaster. Malthus’s seminal work indirectly attempted to explain the nature and origins of poverty in a way that would suggest that there was no viable alternative to capitalism, and more insidiously, “sought to defend the interests of capital in the face of the enormous human misery which capitalism causes”, according to Eric Ross, population expert at the ISS, The Hague. Interestingly, Malthus himself retracted his earlier views on the need for coercive control in a revised version of his paper published in 1803, wherein he proposed that ‘positive controls’ were more likely to succeed.
Today, the burgeoning evidence from population studies suggests that family planning and positive incentives are among the only policy tools that are consistent with the widely accepted conceptualisation of development in terms of capabilities and freedom, a la Amartya Sen and the Human Development Index. Coercive measures have no place in such an analytical and policy framework. This is as true of the Indian context as anywhere else, and as Mr Abhijit Das of Sahayog argued, a two-child norm has the potential to cause immense harm to women's health in the existing social situation where preference for male children is high and women's status is low.
The economic rationale underlying the irrigation-linked population control measure is also dubious. A number of experts have posited that the poor are more likely to have larger families because they lack adequate access to labour markets and their children are also a source of income and security in old age. In this context economist Nancy Birdsall, for example argues that the poor value these instrumental attributes of their children much more than the rich, and hence, “it is easy to imagine a tax forcing a peasant to forgo the birth of a child whose financial security value alone is much greater than the tax”- the ‘tax’ in this case being the restrictions on water use.
More generally, such attempts to penalise the poor for their second-best strategies to overcome labour market failures do not only perpetuate the unequal income distribution structure that is commonly observed in rural India (and indeed between urban and rural India), but a number of implementation hurdles are likely to lead to poor results in terms of efficiency goals too. One seriously problematic example of this is the lack of state capacity to ensure effective targeting. Additionally, there has been no discussion of the possibility that lower fertility rates resulting from this doctrinaire initiative could lead to instability in agricultural yields in the long term or stronger impulses to rural-urban migration of farm labour (with accompanying deleterious effects on urban unemployment and poverty).
In the light of all the evidence at hand, it can be safely claimed that Mr Pawar’s population control policy reflects a backward step in a State that has otherwise made remarkable strides in poverty alleviation and rural development- a case in point being the Employment Guarantee Scheme, where Maharashtra has been no less than a trailblazer. Ironically, given that both the Congress and NCP have their stronghold in rural Maharashtra and their MLAs know that it may be political suicide to back the bill in its current form, it is possible that the bill may not be passed or even if passed may not survive long.
Unfortunately the lesson that policymakers such as Mr Pawar will perhaps fail to take away from this experience is that it is not high fertility rates, per se, that are responsible for a host of barriers faced by the poor in India today. Rather, as population expert Robert Cassen argues, the economy has failed to deliver the correlates of declining fertility, which include better health, education and employment prospects for the marginalised classes in rural India. The Malthusian argument that the government can constrain, at will, the rights of the rural poor in order to maintain balance in a system characterised by absurd income inequalities is untenable in a political democracy such as India.
# posted by Narayan Lakshman @ 12:33 PM 
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