It is a pleasure to be amongst people who are dedicated missionaries in the cause of the country’s future. Smt. Rama Rau and her colleagues do not need to be preached to on the virtues of family planning, for it is their pioneering work which has been largely responsible for the Government and the people of India recognising the vital connection between family planning and planning for the country’s prosperity.
Family planning is an accepted official policy in India. But our programme will not succeed if it remains only an official programme. There are some developmental plans which can be taken up and completed by a few for the many. There are programmes which can be completed by the Government. But family planning is truly a people’s programme. Its success rests on individual citizens. They have to be approached, persuaded, prompted and helped to practise family planning. The entire official machinery for family planning, whether at the Centre or in the States, is meant for this task of persuasion and assistance.
Recently, in agriculture, we have seen that the people’s willingness to adopt new methods has overtaken official effort. This might possibly happen in the family planning programme also. It should be proved to every village and to every family that a smaller, more compact family makes for better health and greater happiness for the family and hence for more prosperity for the village.
Since we took up family planning programmes three or four years ago with the urgency and earnestness they deserve, we have achieved impressive success in terms of numbers. But the success has been limited, as far as I can see, to certain pockets. The most affluent sections of our population and perhaps those groups which are driven by the desire to improve their standard of living—namely, the urban middle class and the skilled industrial workers—are the ones most forthcoming to take advantage of the facilities offered by the Government.
Any new scheme or project, any programme which promises improvement in the living standards of the people is usually taken advantage of by those who are already slightly better off. Higher education helps the urban middle class more than the rural working class. The practice of intensive agricultural production is utilised by those who already have the advantage of irrigation rather than those who are dependent on the rain. Even something as uncontroversial as a library helps only the literate and leaves untouched those who cannot read. Thus, many of our developmental plans often leave the poorest and the weakest where they are, while the slightly better off become stronger. In the process, disparities increase. The official and the voluntary agencies, the latter more than the former, must strengthen their efforts to reach those who are in the greatest need. Official agencies will be in a hurry to fulfil their targets. Non-official agencies may be better able to appreciate the human side of the problem.
The theme of your conference is ‘Family Planning for Hundred Million Couples’. We cannot do without targets. But the danger of fixing targets is that in the quest for figures, the desirable is sometimes subordinated to the practicable. A second danger of the target approach is that too little attention is given to the stabilisation of gains through follow-up and maintenance checks.
In the advanced nations, family planning and economic development were practically unrelated. Therefore, they could offer us very little guidance. Their society, Church and State were all opposed to family planning, and yet the birth rates fell because married couples wanted smaller family. This is true of Protestant-Puritan countries, Catholic countries, as well as socialist countries, all of which frowned on family planning. Yet family planning was practised in all those countries. The compelling reason was that progress already made prompted them to ask for more progress. Our own country, with its mass poverty, cannot leave this task to individual motivation, because such motivation comes only after a certain level of education or economic betterment has already been reached.
It is because we cannot afford to wait until such consciousness becomes widespread that we in India require well-planned official programmes which are implemented with determination. We have several advantages. Unlike the countries of the West, there is no organised religious opposition. Also, the educated person, especially the doctor, enjoys high prestige and his or her judgement carries weight.
The biggest enemy of family planning in India is the lassitude of our people. Even when they are convinced of the benefits of a course of action they make little attempt to exert themselves. Their enthusiasms are often short-lived. The high lapse ratio is a serious problem. This is the reason for our search for a device that has long-lasting effect.
A new danger to the family planning movement has been discernible for sometime, and it shows the link which politics has with all other problems of life. There is propaganda to the effect that the family planning programme will upset the relative population ratios of the various groups in our country and thus perhaps weaken their political power or bargaining position. This pernicious doctrine may well convince people because of its fallacy. History shows ample proof of the spread and influence of false beliefs. Workers in the field and all those interested in the family planning programme must strive to the utmost to combat this sort of propaganda and to allay these imaginary fears. The control of one’s family gives greater opportunities for education and medical care and is, therefore, equally important for all groups, minority or otherwise.
Simultaneous progress in programmes of intensive agriculture and family planning can give us the chance of conquering rural poverty. The one cannot be thought of as a substitute for the other. In the agricultural programme, the combined effort of extension agencies and scientists produced good results. In the family planning programme also, the field programmes must be strengthened by training workers, by setting up more teams, by better production and distribution of family planning appliances, by a more forceful and imaginative use of mass media to impart information and to create the right social climate.
Equally important is biological research. For the last hundred years or so, medical research has concentrated its energies on combating death and alleviating pain. In the last few decades, science has also turned its attention to improving agricultural production. Science must now concentrate on the mysteries of birth, so that individual families can regulate their size, nations can regulate their population, and this planet can decide how many people it should support and at what levels of happiness. Grotesque pictures are being painted of a world in which by A.D. 2000, which is not too far away from us now, the bulk of the people will be dying of starvation. This is a great challenge to science not only in our own country but all over the world.
This is part of ThePrint’s Great Speeches series. It features speeches and debates that shaped modern India.