VHP asks UP govt to remove one-child norm from its draft population control Bill

Vibha Sharma

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Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 12

RSS affiliate Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has taken strong exception to the one-child norm proposed by the draft population control bill of the Yogi Adityanath government. Asking the state law commission to “delete it”, the right-wing organisation also warned Uttar Pradesh that in its case the one-child policy may lead to “furthering of the imbalance between different communities because they are known to respond differently to incentives and disincentives related to family planning and contraception”.

Pointing to an “alarming growing imbalance” in states like Assam and Kerala “where the overall growth of population has declined”, the VHP said: “In both those States, the TFR of Hindus has declined far below the replacement rate of 2.1, but that of Muslims is 3.16 in Assam and 2.33 in Kerala.

“In these States, one of the communities has thus entered the contraction phase while the other is still expanding. UP should avoid getting into that situation. The policy needs to be tailored to redress the imbalance otherwise one-child policy may end up doing the opposite,” states the letter signed by VHP working president Alok Kumar, a senior advocate.

Asserting that the one-child norm goes beyond the stated objectives of the UP Population (Control, Stabilization and Welfare) Bill, 2021, of stabilising the population and promoting a two-child norm, the VHP said: “The preamble of the Bill states that this is a Bill (i) inter alia to stabilize the population and (ii) promotion of two child norm and the VHP agrees with both objects. However, Section 5, 6 (2) and 7 of the Bill, which incentivise the public servants and others to have only one-child in the family go well beyond the said objects”.

“We also notice that the Population Policy of Uttar Pradesh has an object to bring the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to 1.7 within a certain time limit. We suggest that Sections 5, 6(2) and 7 of the Bill as also the object of bringing the TFR to 1.7 needs reconsideration,” the VHP further argued.

 Asserting that the population in a society stabilises when the average number of children born to a woman in her reproductive life (Total Fertility Rate) is marginally above two, the VHP said: “This happens when the TFR is 2.1. At this level of TFR, on average, there are two children born to replace the two parents and the additional one child provides for the possibility of some children dying before reaching the reproductive age and similar other wastage”.

 “Therefore, a two-child policy is considered desirable for achieving population stability. A policy aiming at an average of less than two children per woman leads to a contraction of the population over time. Such contraction has several negative social and economic consequences”.

 Citing the example of China, the VHP said in a contracting population, the ratio between the working-age and dependent population gets disrupted. “There is a rise in the number of persons that each working-age person has to take care of. In an extreme case, the one-child policy would lead to a situation where there is only one working-age adult to look after two parents and four grandparents. In China, which adopted the one-child policy in 1980, it was called the 1-2-4 phenomenon.

 “To get over it, China had to relax its one-child policy for parents who were themselves single children of their parents. It is said that in China, the one-child policy was never applied to more than half of the prospective parents. Within about three decades, it had to be completely withdrawn.

 Stating that single children are known to be “socially less accommodative, the VHP also said that “this is partly because they do not learn to share with siblings, and partly because they are over-indulged and pampered by their parents. This has been referred to as the “Little Emperor” syndrome”.