Dialogue January-March, 2005, Volume 6 No. 3
Obsolescence and Anachronism of Population Control: from
Demography to Demology#
George Simmons, who was Professor and Chair, Department of Population Planning and International Health in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor had made India, and particularly U.P. his area of research for almost two decades, in association with some of India’s eminent population scientists. Based on his studies in Bangladesh and India, he recommended, inter alia, exploring “alternative approaches to delivering health and family planning service….. in the hopes of finding more effective, more efficient, or more administratively feasible intervention”. He suggested the national programs to “expand to include a variety of reversible methods in addition to terminal ones without incurring a significant rise in the cost per contraceptive year.” He had the intellectual honesty to admit “considerably more needs to be learned about the costs and effectiveness of health and family planning interventions. A concerted effort to incorporate such issues in the design of programs and evaluation would benefit policy makers and planners in the allocation of scarce resources aimed at reducing fertility and mortality in rural Bangladesh and elsewhere in the developing world….”
George Simmons could not live to see the crystallization of the new concerns around population issues leading to the paradigm shift in (ICPD) 1994, and the Program of Action on population and development. Family Planning programme interventions have now become an integral part of the Reproductive and Child health in India. This alternative approach is planned to be demand-driven, client centered, need based and gender-sensitive at each community level aimed at more efficient and effective service provision. The earlier authoritarian contraception target from above has been replaced with a new regime to target-free C.N.A. approach of service delivery. The National Population Policy, 2000 has recognized the value of the paradigm shift, and “efficiency and const effectiveness”- which were the prime concerns of George Simmons – are to be measured against new indicators of quality of care, gender-sensitivity, and reproductive rights, rather than the sole indicator of contraceptive prevalence and narrow demographic targets. The involvement of the community and the local self-governing bodies in planning, designing, monitoring and evaluating calls for new instruments and mechanism of management of demand and supply of products and services for achieving responsive, socially audited and result-oriented population-development outcomes in the short, medium and long run. Population studies and research have to be attuned to adopt more inter-disciplinary approach to cater to the new scenario.
Before I discuss the implementability, feasibility and future prospects of the new Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) regime post-IPCD in India and elsewhere, I deem it proper to dwell at some length on the experiences, perspectives and thinking on population issues during the last 100 years or so globally as well as in India, and the rationale behind the evolution of stand-alone “population control” mind set leading to unintended negative consequences.
The foundation seed, as you all know, was a super classic “An Essay on the Principle of Population” written by Malthus in 1798. David Ricardo, the father of modern Economics, is credited with bringing Malthus’s population theory in to that structure, but in such a simplified version as to promote a misconception on the Essay’s actual content. In the words of William Peterson in his book “From Malthus”, Oxford University Press, 1979, Malthus’s “central ideas are often misunderstood even by professional demographers”. Neo-Malthusians in 20th century claimed a “different half-truth – that Malthus’s theory of fertility differed from theirs only in that he did not approve of contraception”.
The general relationship among eugenics, demography, and population control in the last one hundred years centred round the politics of population growth. Institutionalization of linkages internationally ensued in 1990, when the first in a series of international population conferences started. As the international movement for birth/population control began soon after the World War I ended, led by a Nurse, Margaret Sanger, the population scientists (economists, eugenists, demographics, geneticists, doctors and sociologists) liked to fake political positions, where attempting to make the study of populations a true science. For most of them, it was about “control”. The central question of how to reconcile “individual right” with “social responsibility” in the realm of population policy was often posed during the inter-war period in terms of “whether a new birth control movement could unite with the gathering force of eugenics”.
It may be pertinent to recall the world view of population in 1920 by a Harvard Ph.D named Lothrop Stoddard, who is his book titled “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World – Supremacy” (New York: Charles Saibners’ Sons, 1920) referred to “overcrowded colored homelands from where would come the outward thrust of surplus colored men”. He blamed the white men as “responsible for their own demise, since they had reduced famine and disease and had thus removed checks to population increase among non-whites….”.
It is interesting to find reverberations of this argument in the international debate about population trends for many decades. Economists like Harold Wright warned that population trends “may, if they are not modified, destroy western civilization in a few years” and urged for “a world policy in regard to population problems” (Harold Wright, Population: Cambridge University Press, 1923).
Demographer, A.M. Carr-Saunders in his book “Population”, Harold Cox in his book “The Problem of Populations” and C.P. Blacker in his book “Birth Control and the State: A Plea and Forecast, 1926) held the same phobia of “Yellow peril” behind their plea for population control. This was at a time when the population growth rates in Japan, India and other countries in Asia and Africa were less compared to those in the countries of Europe, and “the broad based public health campaigns had barely begun in these countries”. East, in his book “Mankind at the Crossroads”, claimed that “English brains have made a new India in 50 years. Famine-stricken, pestilence-smitten, cobra-bitten India has been given a new lease of life…’. India started being a “focus of international birth control efforts” from the 1920s and ‘30s.
In the sixth international Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference held in New York in 1925, an Indian representative, Taraknath Das, countered the “Yellow peril”, with evidence for the “white peril”, and while endorsing the dissemination of “birth control, emphasized that “it has to be only a part of a programme that aimed at poverty, poor health and ignorance, that were the root cause of India’s population problem”. He looked at birth control within a broader health and social development perspective to “afford greater freedom to women and greater opportunity for real education”. A demographer, Louis Dublin warned against disregard of “the permanent interests of the state” by promoting birth control. He cautioned on the issue of contraceptive safety and reliability. The issue of “control of fertility” remained unresolved: “how to be controlled, by whom, and for what purpose”.
The tendency to go for a policy of “compulsory birth control” persisted from 1927 World Population Conference at Geneva through the discussion in later conferences in the decades of 1930s, ‘50s, ‘ 60s and 70s. The tendency for such coercive policy and strategy was reflected in China going for ‘one-child policy’ from 1979, and in India during 1975-76. It is well realized by now that such tendency smacks of an alarmist, racialist and over-simplistic view of a complex personal and societal issue which needs to be perceived with utmost circumspection, care and empathy.
Population control has been a central concern of population scientists and activists throughout the 20th century. In its negative and over-simplistic sense, it has remained an obsession among many elites in different walks of life – be it academics, doctors, businessmen, political leaders and bureaucrats. Even in the pre-independent India, from the likes of P.K. Wattal, B.T. Ranadive and Radhakamal Mukherjee with their publications in the 1930s (some demographers subscribe to similar views even today), to the likes of politicians, Imam Hossain introducing a resolution in the Council of State in 1935 for taking steps to check the increase in population (the same tendency and mind set with M.P.s coming up with 15-20 resolution for compulsory birth control in every Parliament session even today), to the likes of bureaucrats, Megan and Leonard Rogers (longtime health advisor to the India office) saying that he might have been “better employed in finding a lethal gas which might put the excess population (of India) out of its misery”, Malthusian/Neo-Malthusian mind set of the elites (in a negative sense) has, by and large, shaped the attitude of authoritarianism of the higher and middle class in India on the population issue over last 70 years. It was Radhakamal Mukherjee who convened the first Indian Population Conference in Lucknow in 1936. He also headed the sub-committee on population of the “National Planning Committee” of the Indian national Congress in the 1930s.
Thanks to the spiritual and humanitarian visionary and Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, and the visionary leader and first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, such inhuman, negative, anti-poor and anti-women tendencies and narrow approaches to population control did not form the cornerstone of the policies of population and family planning, when India introduced the official family planning programme as a part of the 5-year development plans from 1951.
Mahatma Gandhi had assessed and felt the pulse of the masses as no other leader or elitist had done. The encounters of two ladies of world “birth control” movement, How-Martyn and Margaret Sanger with Gandhi in the 1930s are well-known. It is a pity that many Neo-Malthusian scholars and stand-alone family planning activists accuse Gandhiji of his negative attitude to population issue. From the records of Margaret Sanger’s encounter with him, it is very clear that Gandhi had a clear vision that Indians should have smaller, but healthier families. He had agreed that uncontrolled reproduction was a social problem. He was a strong advocate for gender justice and women’s empowerment for enabling women to take decisions on child bearing and to negotiate with their husbands to observe abstinence. It is well-known that Gandhi believed in “Gram Swaraj” – the rule of the village community, by the community, for the community.
Nehru’s ideas on population control were based on liberalism and creation of an enabling environment for choices, as would be evident from his ‘Autobiography’ written in 1940s. Some scholars term his attitude as one of ‘ambivalence’.
The post-World War II international movement for population control and family planning had its ideological foundations on the negotiations and lack of unanimity in the events of the first five decades of the 20th century. Demographics, birth control proponents and other population activists shifted their attention from the poor and ethnic minorities in their own societies and countries to the relative growth of poor and underdeveloped countries. In the 1950s and ‘60s, U.S. Government was persuaded by population activists to assert leadership over the international campaign. The cold war in international politics bolstered by the study and interpretation of the demographic trends engendered the fear of the “population bomb” and “population explosion” on the same pedestal of anxiety as the nuclear war. Doomsdayers like Paul Ehrlich cemented international fears of population explosion in India and China, and the threat to security of U.S.A. The international politics of population took on a confrontational turn. Professor W. Brand’s report on the world population problem “skillfully utilized a scientific cloak to faithfully serve the aggressive policy of the imperialists in the International Conference on Population Problems in 1959. a Neo-Malthusian twist was given to the issue by arguing that backwardness, poverty, unemployment and all other hardships of poor countries were only due to “over population”, and hence birth must be controlled first. The State Department of the U.S. Government’s report on “The Growth Trend and the problems of World Population” of 23rd July, 1959 was influenced by Brand’s report.
The Neo-Malthusian view of economic development argued that over population is a cause of poverty, rather than a result of poverty. This argument was based on the assumption that poor and underdeveloped countries and particularly lower class communities therein are “to blame for their unfettered fertility, which leads to their poverty. Their fertility, therefore, must be controlled to ensure greater economic prosperity for the families of the poor, for their nations, and for the world as a whole, since the large poor population in the third world are considered a drain on the world’s resources”.
“The Club of Rome” Report, 1972 (Limits to Growth), and even the “Global 2000 Report to the President 1980” in USA continued the Neo-Malthusian stance.
The Marxists considered the Neo-Malthusian view as “reactionary”. Other anti-Neo-Malthusians and liberalists like E. Dupreel, the Belgian sociologist and Julian Simon became the exponents of a saner and more rational view of population. many economists dismissed the ‘Club of Rome’ report and the Club of Rome itself turned around completely 4 years later, and as much as said: “We were telling you lies before to shake you up”. Julian Simon remarked “people with a lot of education tend to lack respect for the capacity of people who are and have had less education, to cope, and may therefore worry that they won’t be able to handle their problems in their parts of the world” (Julian Simon: “The Ultimate Resource”, 1981, Princeton University Press and “Is there an answer to Malthus? Broadcast interview in October, 1981).
One of the direct outcomes and fallouts of the international and U.S. policy and strategy in the 1950s and ‘60s in India was the system of “family planning targets” initiated in 1966. after the slow phase-by-phase introduction of a “clinical” approach (with equal reliance on conventional and natural methods like ‘rhythm’ and non-invasive methods, particularly for women) and an “extension” plus IEC approach, an aggressive method-specific targeting and new invasive method for women (like IUD) were taken up. The National Family Planning Program was incorporated within the Mother & Child Health System (MCH), where MCH workers were given targets to motivate a particular number of men and women to “accept” different kinds of contraceptives month-by-month. A system of rewards and penalties, and competitions was built-in for State Governments, Hospitals, Districts and MCH workers. To quote Cecilia Van Holian from her book “Birth on the Threshold – Child birth and modernity in South India – University of California Press, 2003.
“The implementation of these policies was a response to increasing pressure by international lending (donor) organizations (World Bank, USAID and Ford Foundation) to step up population control programs as a condition for economic development…”
S. Anandhi in her article “Population Policy and Politics of Reproductive Rights” in the book titled “Population Policy and Reproductive Rights” edited by her under the Madras Initiatives on Women in Development (1994) has referred to the fears of population explosion in which “women are viewed as the bearers of bodies to be counted”. This view of women is inherent in the concept of “Modern Population Control”, wherein women participating in targeted population control are parts of this “embodied modernity”.
Professor Ashish Bose in his book “From Population to People, Vol. I, B.R.P.C., 1988”, has clearly brought out that family planning is not likely to succeed in a scenario where “the demographers tend to get stuck in decimal points, while family planning administrators are obsessed with targets and achievements”. He has very aptly observed: “India’s family planning programme has become increasingly vertical, bureaucratic and dehumanized, where people do not count. Only the number of sterilization cases matter. And all this has happened in the face of the professed policy of making family planning a ‘peoples movement…”.
Historically, one can see the origin of what G. David Horn termed “the notion of the reproductive population as a positivistic, quantifiable and malleable object of governance” as a distinctive view of modernity in 19th century Europe, but the means of constructing and fashioning the given population through ‘population control’ or “family planning” varied greatly across time and space over last 200 years. (G. David Horn 1994, “Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction and Italian Modernity: Princeton University Press. N.J.”).
The drive to reduce population growth and size through stand-alone family planning initiatives in India, with the technical and financial back-up from U.S. and international bodies became a paramount concern; but its “impact on the experience of the poor and marginalized” has, more often than not, been negative, disastrous and inhuman.
It will not be out of place here to recall the interesting debate between demographers Dr. Doanld J. Bogue and Amy Tsui on one side, and Paul Demeny on the other, during 1978 and 1979. Dr, Donld J Bogue was one of the first demographers to predict “the end of the population explosion” in 1967 (Amy Ong Tsui and Donal J. Bogue’s paper “Declining World fertility: Trends causes and implications” in Population Bulletin, 33, Number 4 and ‘The Public Interest Number – 7 (1967), brought out by “Population reference Bureau”, 1978). The prediction was based on the theory that “heroic efforts by Governments, involving the exercise of political and administrative muscle, may hold out greater, if more ominous programmatic promise”.
Paul Demeny in a commentary on this prediction and the theory underlying therein said “…. But the belief that achievement of zero population growth can be expected as a natural consequence of increased availability and perfection of birth control methods is naïve in the extreme or banks unwisely on sheer good luck”. (Notes and commentary by Paul Demeny in “Population and Development Review, Volume – 5, Number – 1, Pages 141 – 162, March, 1979).
As I have told earlier, the 1960’s and ‘70s can be considered as “the heyday of the international campaign” to control population growth, particularly in poor and developing countries. The western countries came out with very generous support for programmes “spreading the message that a small family was the key to prosperity and personal fulfillment” (Mathew Connelly: “Population Control is History: New Perspectives on the International campaign to limit Population Growth, published by CSSH).
The cause was discredited for various reasons, like:
(i) Failure of early fertility limitation,
(ii) Coercive measures,
(iii) Prediction or prophesy of gloom and doom of famine” not coming true, and
(iv) Internal divisions and external opposition in the family planning coalition from “newly powerful constituencies” like environmentalists and feminists.
The conflicting perceptions in the 1970s and ‘80s over the global politics of population (e.g. Bucharest and Mexico Official Population Conference) are well-known. As families grew smaller in the 1980s and ‘90s, in very region of the world, below-replacement level and new pandemics like HIV-AIDS raised the phenomenon of population decline. The population control activists and scholars have either given up or been more discreet or muted in using languages of “population bomb”, “population explosion” and “population control” in favour of the languages of “population and development”, “population stabilization”, “gender equity, equality and justice”, “quality of care”, “reproductive rights” and promotion of “women’s sexual rights and health”, among others.
The paradigm shift with ICPD, 1994 gave a new, but more realistic dimension to the resolution of population problem in all circumstances.
It has been realized that “target” approach to reducing population has been ineffective, and has to be rejected straightaway. Governments in many countries are moving away from narrow demographic approaches to population issues towards a focus on issues of “gender inequality” and lack of “reproductive rights and choices” as key factors contributing to the problems of population growth.
The Government of India’s family planning programme was being criticized by NGOs’, women’s groups and rights-based scholars for it lack of concerns and sensitivity over human rights and dignity abuses associated with the target approach. The feminist organizations started a systematic campaign against human rights abuses associated with the Norplant and Depo-provera.
In view of these concerns and the sustained campaigns, and on India signing the ICPD Programme of Action in 1994, Government abolished the system of targets and the “target-free” reproductive and child health care approach was accepted from 1996-1997 onwards. As stated earlier, the RCH approach (further backed up by a solid national policy on population in 2000) has opened a new vista with “a decentralized planning approach” and a more comprehensive and holistic vision of “women’s health” throughout the life cycle. Goals are to be set primarily at the district level, based on the work plans of the local communities prepared with a CAN approach. Family planning/contraceptive targets for specified numbers of acceptors are to be replaced by targets which could serve as indicators of the “Quality of health care needed and provided”.
There are some diehard ‘population control’ exponents among politicians, bureaucrats, demographers and other sections of the elite, who have not reconciled to the paradigm shift, and who feel more comfortable with an authoritarian policy regime of quantitative targetisis, for the sake of achieving soft and quick-fix options (either in field implementation or reseach studies). They often deride the “target free” approach as one which leads to complete lack of accountability and lack of quick and visible results on the ground (as reflected in the administrative reports). Such mind set is understandable in as much as most of the present generation of senior politicians, bureaucrats and scholars have been trained and oriented in Neo-Malthusian studies of population and have been players in or witness to implementation of MCH policies, which “throughout India have been dominated by Family Planning and driven by numerical targets for so long that it will take time for a fundamental reorientation to transpire…..It is yet to take deep roots in peoples’ minds….” (Cecilia Van Hollen: “Birth on the Threshold”, 2003).
To allay the fears of these “population control” exponents of the loss of the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR), it can be said that the rates of contraception “acceptors” have continued to rise in a target-free environment, since many women – “ have begun to voluntarily opt for family planning”, particularly in South Indian states.
A comparison of data of NFHS-I (1992-93) with the data of NFHS-II (1998-99) reveals an 18 percent increase in contraceptive prevalence during 6 ½ years in the 1990s….A preliminary comparison of data from the RCH Survey I (1998-99) and the first phase of the RCH Survey II (2002), reflecting changes after the introduction of the CNNA and RCH Program, also indicates an increase in contraceptive use in all the major states, particularly U.P., M.P. and Himachal Pradesh”. (K.G. Santhya: Changing family planning scenario in India: An overview of recent evidence, Regional Working Papers of Population Council, 2003, No. 17).
To quote Santhya: “Early assessments of the impact of the new policy and programme initiatives suggest some improvement in overall indicators such as CPR and the magnitude of the need for contraception. However, underlying issues including limited contraceptive choice, poor quality of services, restricted access, gender inequalities and lack of male involvement continue to plague the programme”. Lacunae like low level of ownership of and commitment to RCH at the state level and weak programme management at the district level, particularly in the Empowered Action Group (EAG) states, and inadequate decentralization of process remain”.
It may be clarified that “the vital discourses” of the new policy like
(i) Participatory planning,
(ii) Target free,
(iii) Life cycle, and
(iv) Social health
Are to quote Cecilia “not merely top-down instruments of propaganda, but, in fact, have long been brewing at the local, as evidenced by the local critiques of earlier policies pursued since the 1960s”.
Therefore, “regardless of whether or not the Governments involved are now capable of and committed to implementing a policy that reflects a fundamental reorientation towards women’s health” and reproductive rights, “the rhetoric of the policy resonates the local concerns of the women who are the recipients of health services”.
A symposium on population planning and advocacy held towards the end of 2001 discussed on the cotemporary population issues in India post-ICPD and post-National Population Policy, 2000. The incongruities in state population policies vis-à-vis the NPP and ICPD were brought out in sharp focus. The symposium papers have been published in a special issue (Beyond Numbers) of ‘SEMINAR’ (511, March 2002). To quote Leela Visaria and Vimala Ramachandran in this SEMINAR issue, “The challenge before all the players in this field is to frame population and development issues in the larger context of gender justice and women’s autonomy”. To quote Gita Sen and Aditi Iyer: “….given the crucial importance of the population momentum and unwanted fertility in the country, incentives and disincentives to pressure people to want fewer children may simply be barking up the wrong tree. They may be neither relevant nor particularly effective in bringing down the growth rate of population”.
The operationalisation of the new Population Policy and the RCH strategy has not yet been taken up with sincerely in many districts. Some state Governments simply linked together pre-existing Family Planning, Child survival and safe motherhood, RTI, STD and abortion services; and “Family Planning remained the dominant force in the equation”. The numerical family Planning targets from above have not been completely given up. They call this as “expected level of achievement” – an euphemism for “top-down targets”. The instructions ands directions from some State Governments and the conflicting and ambivalent approach of National Population Commission and Government of India, complicate the situation further.
The increase in female literacy, women’s increasing role at Panchayati Raj institutions, formation of consortia and watch-dog institutions of NGOs-CBOs-SHGs – Gender – Rights activists will ensure commitment to active participation in and better implementation of the target-free CAN Reproductive Health and Population Policy and strategy at the community level. Deviation from and distortion of the basic norms of the new strategy should not be allowed in any circumstances. The National and State Human Rights and Women’s Commissions have to play very vital role in this respect. Much more systematic and evidence-based advocacy efforts have to be mounted by advocates and researchers who have fully internalized the paradigm shift, and the elite target audience at different levels have to be educated and influenced to stay on course. This is the key challenge facing us.
Family, a word about research. Demographic research has taken rather a limited perspective in its study of differences among communities divided on racial, caste, tribal and class lines. This is more true of fertility and family formation research. Sociological differentials like essentialism, assimilationism and racial / caste and class stratification are to be studied. Same is true of the gender issues. In this connection, I would like to quote Antonio Mc Daniel: “Like much demographic research, fertility and family formation research has taken a limited perspective in its study of racial differences”. (Antonio Mc Daniel in “Fertility and racial Stratification” in Population & Development Review _________).
Secondly, I would like to re-iterate what Susan Greenhalgh observed in her article titled “Anthropology Theorizes Reproduction: Integrating practice with political-economic and feminist perspectives” in the book “Situating Fertility: Anthropology and demographic Inquiry” (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995):
“A political economy of fertility is a multi-leveled field of enquiry. It combines societal structure and individual agency, both of which generally escape the demographer’s attention, and draws on both quantitative and qualitative research methods and materials …..The objective is to understand institutions and behaviour evolved and how its constitutive elements relate to each other…….”.
I would suggest we need more inter-disciplinary research on the population issues that confront us today. The demographers and socio-cultural anthropologists have to reach out to each other, much more than ever before. “It is well-known by now that quantitative data and analysis at micro-level, along with ethnographic research, can give more compelling explanations of population phenomena like female infanticide and foeticide”, as a fall-out of fertility as a fall-out of fertility transition and one or two-child norm policies in China and India. I need not have to tell this audience that John Caldwell and Geoffrey McNicoll have shown and emphasized the merits, nuances and limitations of these micro-approaches to demographic research.
To quote Greenhalah again “An over reliance on quantitative research has constrained our understanding of the full complexity and context of fertility; it has also provided a powerful tool to uncover justice, as in the case of China’s skewed male-female ratios”.
Similarly I would refer to Rachel Snow’s caution that “while reliability was often the overriding criterion of those who direct contraceptive research, focus groups across cultures show it is a major concern for many poor women as well. Privileging ‘user control” regardless of the social context in which contraceptives are actually used might discourage the development of technologies like injectables, and thus deprive some women of the only means to limit their fertility without fear of retaliation”. (Matthew Connelly: Population Control is History, ibid).
Earlier anthropological approaches to reproduction tended to focus on how reproductive practices and beliefs reflected social and cultural systems. Scholars now argue that anthropology can benefit from viewing ‘reproduction’ itself as a key site for understanding the ways in which “people reconceptualise and reorganize the world in which they live”. This is a “processual view of culture-in-the-making”. Cross-cutting issues of equity, entitlement, living standards and rights could be captured more succinctly, in order to provide more meaningful policy prescriptions on population-development-environment.
Time has come for broadening ‘Demography’ into what I term as “Demology’ in the interest of attuning research to the needs of the hour – to help in better understanding of people constituting population.
Reference:
Anandhi, S., (1994), “Population Policy and Politics of Reproductive Rights” in “Population Policy and reproductive Rights”, edited by S. Anandhi, Madras Initiatives on Women in Development.
Bose, Ashish., (1988), “From Population to People”. Vol. I, B.R. Publishing Corporation
Connelly, Mathew., “Population Control is History: New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth”, CSSH.
Demeny, Paul., (1979), “Notes and Commentary”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 5, No. 1.
Govt. of India, (2000), “National Population Policy-2000”, Department of family Welfare, Ministry of Health and family Welfare.
Greenhalgh, Susan., (1995) “Anthropology Theorizes Reproduction: Integrating practice with political-economic and feminist perspectives” in “Situating fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry”, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Hollan, Cecilia van., (2003), “Birth on the Threshold – Child Birth and Modernity in South India”, University of California Press.
Horn, G. David., (1994), “Social Bodies: Science, reproduction and Italian Modernity” Princeton University Press, N.J.
ICPD-POA (1994), Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, Sept. 1994, UNFPA.
Peterson, William., (1979), “From Malthus”, Oxford University Press.
Santhya, K.G., (2003), “Changing family planning scenario in India in India: An Overview of recent evidence”, Regional Working Paper No. 17, Population Council.
Sen, Gita and Aditi Iyer (2002), “incentives and Disincentives: Necessary, Effective, Just? In ‘Beyond Numbers’, SEMINAR NO. 511.
Simon, Julian., (1981), “The Ultimate Resource”, Princeton University Press.
Stoddard, Lothrop., (1920), “The Rising Tide of Color Against “White World – Supremacy”, Charles Saibners’ Sons, New York.
Tsui, Amy Ong and Bogue Donal J. (1967), “Declining World Fertility: Trends, causes and implications”, Population Bulletin. 33, Number 4.
Visaria, Leela and Vimla Ramachandran (2002), “The Problem” in ‘Beyond Numbers’, SEMINAR, No. 511.
Wright, Harold., (1923), “Population”, Cambridge University Press.