India Fights Population Boom With Cash Payments To Couples Who Delay Babies

New York Times:

...If youth is India's advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand schooling and other services. In coming decades, India is projected to surpass China as the world's most populous nation, and the critical uncertainty is just how populous it will be.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[SuAK]

12:36 PM on 09/01/2010

A laudable initiative, but certainly not the first one. Back in the 70s and 80s India had an immensely successful family planning campaign but due to political unrest and forced vasectomy on unmarried youth and marginalized communities, the fear of the masses of contraceptives, tubal ligation and vasectomy got so deeply rooted, that any attempts to promote such measures were widely ignored. Furthermore, the social economic strutcure of India is such that the male is preferred as he brings dowry and is a bread winner. Also more the number of children, more will be the household income and they will all end up earning. Such thought led to many families producing children at an industrial rate. Another reason for the increase in population is the uneasiness of minority groups as a minority in India. Muslim communities that have little access to education think that in a Hindu state, a stronghold can only be achieved by sheer strength of numbers. To counter this, the less educated hindu communities try to have a high birth rate as they fear that Muslims or other religons will surpass their numbers. The solution lies not in a national birth control campaign but rather at a grassroot level campaign aimed at the communities that pretty much lack everything. To further excaberate the problem, the general population feels uncomfortable when talking about sex, family planning and contraceptives.

[isjois]

02:16 PM on 08/23/2010

"When I dug into this, I discovered one variable that determines the growth of population in a culture: When women have equal power with men, the population stabilizes, and in those nations where women are bought and sold like cattle, regardless of their wealth or technology, the population explodes. It is as simple as that." (Thom Hartmann) http://www.bodhitree.com/lectures/hartmann.html

Unfortunately, there are still many men who don't want to share power with women.

[TurningPoint Sustainabil]

02:10 PM on 08/23/2010

Good...,

Buy them off...,
now if we can only get the rest of the world to follow Chindia's lead.

[Hankskool]

03:18 AM on 08/23/2010

India? I wish the idea would catch on here. All of the world's major problems: environmental damage, war, famine, drought, stupidity... are directly tied into our overpopulation of it. Our rinky dink little token acknowledgements to save the planet mean nothing in the absence of a sharp reversal of the population's growth.
REAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS DON'T BREED.

[RobertFromMN]

05:07 AM on 08/23/2010

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2054rank.html?countryName=India&countryCode=in®ionCode=sas&rank=87#in
India, with the world's second-highest population, ranks 87th in birth rate. The U.S. ranks 151st. The populations of developing countries are exploding while the populations of industrialized countries are holding close to steady.
http://www.environmentupdates.com/images/world-population-chart.jpg
The global population is already too high because it grows exponentially as that chart shows. We need to work on global zero population growth NOW.

[Chaucea]

05:37 PM on 08/23/2010

Absolutely!!

"Overpopulation is the ONLY problem," said Dr. Charles A. Hall, a systems ecologist. "If we had 100 million people on Earth - or better, 10 million - no others would be a problem."

[DoesItMatter]

02:22 PM on 08/26/2010

If we had 0, then?

[daisymp]

02:53 AM on 08/23/2010

What a unique idea- paying families to delay having children. I certainly hope this scheme catches on and spreads to other districts in India.

But as the article says "An educated woman is the best contraceptive".

I really hope the Indian government continues to fund and support the agencies and NGOs that work to educate rural women on family planning options.
Thanks to their efforts, oral contraceptive use has steadily increased and many women opt for sterilization immediately after the second child.

[DrewBlay]

01:51 AM on 08/23/2010

take a look here in this free online math games site: http://www.free-training-tutorial.com/place-value-games.html

[FTracy3]

01:08 AM on 08/23/2010

If India stops having kids then who am I going to get frustrated with as I try to explain my problem as they read from a branching script on an American company tech support line?

[hippie4ever]

11:01 PM on 08/22/2010

paying people not to breed...priceless

[StephenJK]

01:34 AM on 08/23/2010

Giving people a television show and paying buku bucks to breed.......pricelesser....

[MindyC]

08:54 PM on 08/22/2010

Population control is a difficult problem, but honestly, giving what is essentially a tax credit for waiting to have children, in a country completely unable to maintain its current population, let alone growth, seems almost reasonable.

China has had it's one-child policy in place for 20-some years? That is a whole discussion in and of itself. Started to avoid starvation due to massive droughts that made it impossible to feed the rapidly growing population, the policy allowed families to have one child unless they had farms; if so, they could have two to help with the farming. Some of the wealthier people simply paid the fines and had additional offspring, but poor people hid children (meaning they are not "on the record" and therefore cannot attend school or receive any of the benefits of being a registered citizen), or they abandoned children, aborted or killed them. Families wanted boys, so by the early '90s, China's orphanages were full to bursting with healthy baby girl foundlings. One of the consequences of the patriarchal preference for boys is that they now have a significant gender imbalance and are trying to figure out what to do about it - because a generation with an overabundance of unmarried men will have serious societal repercussions.

So India's idea, aimed at encouraging delayed child-bearing, which, by the nature of it, will likely lower the average number of children per couple, without imposing gender preferences. And it's voluntary. So worth some thought?

[vivi fb]

08:18 PM on 08/22/2010

Vasectomy doesn't work for birth control, simply because even if you have 90% of the male population made sterile, the 10% left can impregnate the women. So they really should invest in education programs, and not only pay people to not have children.

[nisha]

12:53 AM on 08/23/2010

This idea of your can't be accomplished without a lot of Viagra.

[StephenJK]

01:35 AM on 08/23/2010

WRONG! One man can accomplish the whole thing. I WILL SHOW YOU!

[DoesItMatter]

10:52 AM on 08/23/2010

If you read the article, you would notice this is just one among several programs.

[TYRANNASAURUS]

07:51 PM on 08/22/2010

$106 FOR JUST DELAYING..................IT'S A LITTLE TOO LITTLE TOO LATE..... THIS IS THE ELEPHANT CALLED GLOBAL WARMING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM THAT EVERYONE TALKS AROUND BECAUSE WE DON'T WANT TO UPSET THE RELIGIOUS OPERATIONS .....

THIS IS SOMETHING INDIA SHOULD HAVE DONE 100 YEARS AGO......SAME FOR CHINA, BANGLADESH, NIGERIA, MEXICO, EGYPT, INDONESIA, AND MOST OF SOUTH EASTERN ASIA....AND LET'S NOT FORGET THE UNITED STATES WITH ITS 300,000,000 PEOPLE AND OH DID I FAIL YO MENTION THE......... ESTIMATED 25,000,000 LOOKING FOR A JOB?

[stormpilot]

08:09 PM on 08/22/2010

Pretty much the entire world, yes.

[TYRANNASAURUS]

08:10 PM on 08/22/2010

P.S. THE PEOPLES IN THESE COUNTRIES HAVE BEEN LIVING ON THE BORDERLINE OF POVERTY FOR SO MANY YEARS NOW THEY DON'T KNOW HOW NOR WOULD THEY BE INTERESTED IN CHANGE......... GREENHOUSE WILL DO FOR THEM WHAT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THEM TO DO FOR THEMSELVES.... BILLIONS WILL DIE IN A VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME ONCE THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCES OF GLOBAL WARMING PICKS UP MOMENTUM.

[MindyC]

08:47 PM on 08/22/2010

You make valid points, but will you please stop yelling? Much easier to read and digest if you don't use all caps. Thank you.

[Simone Hill]

06:23 PM on 08/22/2010

Wow, getting paid to NOT have kids. I wonder what the GOP thinks about this since usually they are always overly obsessed with the "welfare mother with six kids" stereotype whenever it comes to government assistance programs.

[DoesItMatter]

06:52 PM on 08/22/2010

Why would it matter what GOP thinks?

[Simone Hill]

09:05 PM on 08/22/2010

What do you mean? I did not say that it either does or does not matter. I said I was curious to know how this would fit into the republican ideology. I think it would be interesting to know.

[conservo]

07:41 PM on 08/22/2010

Well, I'm not a Republican but I am a Libertarian and I am not thrilled about the idea of paying people to not have kids. However, I do recognize that our ever growing population is a critical matter and we need to have a serious conversation reguarding the hazards and possible family planning solutions concerning population growth. Unfortunately, many on the Right become riled at even the mere mention that this may be an issue that needs to be discussed----and that is a shame. They are missing the mark.

[Elizabeth Gregory]

10:33 PM on 08/22/2010

Paying people to delay having kids - seems slightly different.

[jeffinmichigan]

06:20 PM on 08/22/2010

An idea worth importing...

Can we start with the urban youth in Detroit?

[edejan]

10:44 PM on 08/22/2010

HUH? Where did that come from?

[Elizabeth Gregory]

05:44 PM on 08/22/2010

Paying people to delay the start of their families is just the first of a cascade of benefits that accrue to those who wait of whatever class--in the US, in India and around the world.

Women who start their families later - by two years or twenty - are more educated; as a result their kids are too. They also earn more, so the kids they have later are better off. Etc.!

www.domesticproduct.net

[marianproletarian]

01:17 PM on 08/23/2010

I agree, I think it's a great idea.

[Yaxchibonam]

05:25 PM on 08/22/2010

Back in the late sixties, early seventies, there were programs that gave transistor radios to poor Indian men who agreed to undergo vasectomies. I don't know if trying to tackle it from the birth control end ever works, especially since all those efforts are focused on the poor. People need education, hope, and jobs. Once they get these things, they generally reduce the size of their families.