Disruptive policies require a degree of mobilisation if it wants to achieve their outcomes. Family planning in the First Five Year Plan was one such policy and Kerala’s demographic transition, only two decades later, has a lesson to offer.
Kerala experienced a transition from high death and birth rates to lower death and birth rates in the 1970s due to several factors – favourably changing nuptial patterns, spread of literacy, utilisation of medical care, higher per capita income, and voluntary limitations of family size by practising family planning.
History of Family Planning in Kerala
The first motion debated in the erstwhile Travancore Cochin Legislative assembly in 1951 to resolve whether family planning was to be supported by the state was voted down. Despite discussing themes like morality, Neo-Malthusianism, feminism, religion, western conspiracies, and the elusive male child, the motion found more detractors owing to the suspicions it evoked, the newness of artificial methods of birth control, and the belief that some members in the August House were present only because their parents chose to be fecund.
The next mention of family planning in a legislative transcript dates to 1956, which says that the family planning programme kicked off officially in Kerala in 1955 with the opening of 11 clinics.
1958 saw the appointment of a full-time family planning officer and the setting up of a state family planning board and district committees. The number of family planning clinics rose from 238 in 1963 to 1,688 in 1970 and by 1971, the first Family Planning Mela in India had been held in Ernakulam and 4,17,210 surgeries of various types had been performed since the inception of the programme.
Coercive Ways of Family Planning
Through this 25 years, the various governments maintained an unflinching stance, at least on legislative paper, to not make the programme compulsory and to not make non-compliance punitive.
In 1960, an opposition member first suggested the idea of forcing public servants to undergo family planning procedures to set an example.
The then Health and Public Services minister responded that the intention of the government was to influence and not coerce.
Such suggestions resurfaced when doctors and workers refused to perform these services due to their principled oppositions, and when religious groups held protests and issued memorandums.
All the ministers responding to these offered responses ranging from a penchant for non-coercive policies, to proposals that increased awareness using media.
In 1976, when the questions were raised more vehemently, thanks to the ‘National Emergency’ and compulsory sterilisations, the Health and Public Services Minister replied that “motivation of the people through extension of education and mass media to accept family planning as a way of life, and making available the required services are the measures adopted by the government.”
This is remarkable more so because the methods of coercion in family planning coming from the Centre, as per Davidson Gwatkin, were not novel but were only implemented more vigorously and on a wider scale.
Marika Vicziany echoes this sentiment when she says that the sterilisation campaign of the Indian ‘Emergency’ appears shocking. This is partly because it is contrasted with a supposedly voluntary family planning program of the preceding decade thus, dismissing instances of coercion as aberrations.
Implementing a Policy by Offering Incentives
Kerala government’s decision to never coerce finds vindication in demographic transition. The stress on incentivising intrinsic motivations over and above coercion created a free market situation which allowed citizens to understand and calculate their tradeoffs.
In 1969, an opposition member once brought up an incidence of people travelling to Madras as the monetary compensation for undergoing sterilisation was higher.
It may not be unwise to suggest that this successful example from the previous century has lessons for today. In the last few months, India has seen two policies of mobilisation at the national level; the forced abandonment of currency notes with the adoption of new ones, and the push to go cashless.
Regardless of whether the latter may be a derivative of the former, the incentives it is creating for people to adopt and gain in the form of cashbacks, discounts and offers seem more favourable than policies that leave citizens with no option but to fall in line, quite literally as well as figuratively.
(The author is a student at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and can be reached @Balupattath. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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