By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, already has 240 million people – more that of many entire countries – and wants to limit the birth rate to two per family before carless breeding further spikes ignorance, disease, and poverty.
The proposed legislation is borrowed from India’s northeastern neighbour, China, the world’s most populous country of 1.41 billion, which is encouraging three children per family.
But China is pursuing its own control for a different reason.
The country enforced a one-child policy from 1980 but from 2016 allowed all families to have two children because the birth rate has shrunk too low, and too dangerous, for it cannot support the economy and an expanding ageing population.
But the change did not persuade Chinese women to have more babies.
China introduced a three-child policy in May 2021 after Chinese mothers gave birth to just 12 million babies in 2020.
Latest Beijing data shows that the average annual population growth rate was 0.53 per cent over the past 10 years, down from a rate of 0.57 per cent between 2000 and 2010 – bringing the population to 1.41 billion.
Another set of data released in May shows that around 12 million babies were born in 2020 – a significant decrease from the 18 million in 2016, and the lowest number of births recorded since the 1960s.
Faced with old people outnumbering the young, and with young couples reluctant to embrace the new policy to have two children, let alone three, China heads towards social dislocation unless it adopts effective measures, such as attracting immigration.
Uttar Pradesh seeks to avert population bomb
On the other hand, CNN reports, the proposed legislation in Uttar Pradesh aims to discourage couples from having more than two children, becoming the second state ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party to make such a proposal.
Today, India’s population stands at 1.38 billion people, according to the World Bank, second only to China.
If Uttar Pradesh were a country, its 240 million people would make it the world’s fifth most populous, and population density in the northern state is more than double the national average.
Under the state government proposals unveiled on July 10, couples with more than two children would not be allowed to receive government benefits or subsidies and would be barred from applying for state government jobs.
The bill says that because of the state’s “limited ecological and economic resources at hand, it is necessary and urgent that the provision of the basic necessities of human life are accessible to all citizen”.
Per capita income in Uttar Pradesh is less than half the national average.
The draft law, which is open for public comments until July, would need to be ratified by state lawmakers.
India, which is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2027, does not have a national two-child policy.
The northeastern state of Assam, which is also ruled by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, last month announced plans for a similar measure that would withhold government benefits from families with more than two children.
Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said the proposal is partly to control the population growth of the state’s Bengali-speaking Muslims who trace their origins to neighboring Bangladesh.
Uttar Pradesh, governed by Hindu hardliner Yogi Adityanath, is also home to a big Muslim population.
Land shrinking, population rising
The draft law includes incentives for two-child couples if one of them opts for voluntary sterilisation, including soft loans for construction or house purchases and rebates on utility bills and property taxes.
Indian politicians have pushed for a two-child policy for the nation’s citizens before.
In 2016, a legislator from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh introduced a population control bill in Parliament.
“No person shall procreate more than two living children after a period of one year from the commencement of this Act,” stated the bill, which never came to a vote.
The bill’s introduction opened up a debate, with many in favor of the measures. More than 100 legislators submitted a letter to the president of India, Ram Nath Kovind, appealing for him to take their demand seriously.
“The land is shrinking and the population is rising. There is no place to build homes. In this situation, there should be some control on population,” Ganesh Singh, a legislator demanding reform told CNN at the time.
“Now or later, this will have to be done.”