Population policy in India

On May 11, 2000 India became the world's second demographic billionaire. If current trends continue, India may overtake China in 2045 to become most populous country in the world (GOI, 2000a). Given the rather poor state of the Indian economy and the very low level of living standards for most of its population, this fact puts a great strain on the government's efforts to promote social development. This paper is an attempt to explain the reasons for relative backward social development in India, not only by looking onto social and economic indicators, but also by highlighting the impact of the political system, which is so much different from that of China, where the government has been a great deal more successful in addressing the issue of rapidly increasing population growth and in supporting, or bringing forth, social and economic development.

Two thirds of India's population growth in the 20" century took place after 1971, that is the same time when the political leadership in China, that is Mao Ze-dong and his followers, came to realize the importance of population policy, and implemented the "one-child-per-- couple" policy, which was, and still is today, enforced by virtually all means. Women that work in the state sector are forced to take a pregnancy test every year in the community they were born in. In case they are found to be pregnant a second time they lose their jobs and face defamation and a series of penalties. For this reason, the big cities where the party apparatus has been functioning well, the new population policy that has been introduced in the early 1970s has functioned well, reducing greatly China's birthrate, especially in the big cities. In the countryside, the population policy has been much less effective, and the new prosperity of the private sector industry has led to a new surge in birth-rates in cities in the much less-controlled, but economically fast developing suburban areas of developing cities on, for example, in China's south-eastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, where families with four and five children of the new rich, formerly rural population are very common and not the exception anymore (cf Chow, 1999; Aspalter, own observations).

Thus, the question that arises here is can we also detect the...