Mrinal Pande 
“At one time I had called for observing family planning, but I am now making an appeal to people to increase the population by producing more children.”
– N. Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh
“… Today there is a scenario of decreasing Lok Sabha constituencies. It raises a question: why should we restrict ourselves to having fewer children? Why shouldn’t we aim for 16 children?”
– M.K. Stalin, chief minister of Tamil Nadu
With their recent statements, the two powerful male chief ministers have recently questioned the birth limits encouraged by India’s family planning programme launched in the ’50s. Both rule two of the richest and most progressive of our southern states that have rigidly held to the two-children-per-family norm and have far higher economic and social indices than most northern states.
Stalin has two children and his Andhra counterpart Naidu has one son. It is interesting to know why they are now demanding a return to larger families. It is just as interesting to note that neither seems to focus upon the repercussions of the expansion on females, the actual bearers of children. Pregnancy as well as the birth risks associated with repeated child-bearing are likely to swell along with a swell in population.
Naidu and Stalin are not the first ones to question small families, nor are their main reasons (fewer seats in the Lok Sabha, less allocation of central funds and a swell in the numbers of retired and ageing people in their states) the only reasons for opting for larger families.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
A number of Hindu and Muslim leaders have also repeatedly stated that their tribe must increase their numbers quickly lest they risk becoming voiceless minorities. Not too long ago, in 2016 to be precise, at a convention of newly married couples, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker named Darpan quoted the RSS chief’s plea for Hindus increasing their fertility rates “for the sake of society, our culture and our civilisation.”
A video about the purported population explosion of Muslims in Europe and elsewhere in the world was reportedly shown thereafter.
BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj and associates of the controversial godman Yati Narsinghanand have also gone on record urging Hindus to produce more children to avoid India becoming a Muslim-majority state.
All promoters of this bizarre idea of producing more children to have greater power and a voice louder than the rest seem to be driven by the same urge that led Chinese leader Mao Zedong to encourage high fertility rates – he is said to have declared that “With many people, strength is great.” He too did not show any concern with pregnancy and childbirth-related issues that among women would have generated questions and demanded answers the state was not prepared to give.
In the case of India, leaders from both the ruling party and the opposition are also largely non-inclusive in demanding 16 children per family. Fears the southern satraps seem to be gripped with have more to do with proportional representation in the Lok Sabha, and the fears are not unreal.
If the delimitation of seats in the Lok Sabha (an exercise frozen for 25 years in 2001) happens as expected in 2026, the north with its higher population will see an increase in its authority over the southern states.
No state of course will have zero seats, but the five southern states may lose 23 seats if the change in demography in the last 25 years is taken into account. And even if the total number of seats stays as is, the southern states would lose 25 seats and the top five in the north will get 33 additional seats.
Fewer seats and a smaller population may mean the better-governed and more prosperous South will get a lower share of central funds despite contributing more to the central kitty than many ‘BIMARU’ states.
Some ideas are not really new but need reaffirmation at confused times like this. One of these is a simple idea that women citizens are intrinsically as human as men and not just a sum total of certain biological givens that can be adjusted randomly by men without consulting women.
Also read | In Numbers: The Concerns Behind South Indian Politicians’ Remarks on Having More Children
Rooting for more and more children should be seen as a fundamental infringement on young mothers’ reproductive rights and physical autonomy. As more and more families turn nuclear with both parents working, they find that political decisions, randomness in limiting and then delimiting family size, and environmental changes all shape and affect both men and women equally.
So at the moment, all men and women seem in agreement with the simple notion that the Family Planning programme ushered in four decades ago: chhota parivar, sukh ka aadhaar. (A small family is a happy family).
The absurd and politically driven lurch from Europe to China to India of pushing families to a past when fathers sired families with a large brood and women bore their progeny as a matter of course, seems senseless to better-educated young couples today who are marrying and having children much later than their parents did.
The high cost of having more children, the pregnancy-related need for medical supervision, the harsh maternity leave policies most private companies have and the unequal burden of child-rearing that women of all classes and castes still experience, makes their exclusion from political debates on fertility absurd.
A 2022 survey by the Chinese recruitment firm Zhilian Zhaopin of professional women revealed that the reason the three-child policy failed to take root in an authoritarian state like China was that on the ground, only 0.8% of surveyed women wanted three children. Many women were happy marrying later and felt that their employment would be negatively affected by having more children – perhaps in view of clear pregnancy-based discrimination at the workplace.
Given China’s spectacular failure to turn the clock back on fertility norms, leaders demanding more and more children per family should move tactically and think about becoming inclusive. Instead of pushing for more children, they should push for a bigger say for women from the South in the Lok Sabha and build a case for the criterion of delimitation being demographic change and not demographic performance.
In general, women down South look better placed on educational and social indices. Good administration has seen to it that the fruits of progress reach them regularly as also medical facilities.
Lending support to women would automatically give them greater leverage with the Union government that has been beating its own drum about being pro-mothers, sisters and daughters. This would also present a healthy parallel to the increasingly authoritarian, male chauvinist and Hindi-Hindu stance the Union government has been selling.
North or South, as Indians living in the world’s largest democracy, we must all now seriously debate why it is that instead of asking the economy and polity to adjust to the change in the size of families, males dominating the political, religious and economic spheres expect women to adjust their fertility so that the needs for more Hindus, more Lok Sabha seats, skilled labour or cannon fodder are met.
It would be relevant to point out here that even our initial state-driven movements for smaller families and saving planet Earth have arisen not from a primary concern for mothers or Mother Earth, but from pressures generated by the wastefulness of the Vikas model and the repeated misallocation of financial resources by governments controlling all central funds, which they use for their own long-term political well being.
A revolutionary delimitation exercise where no state gets fewer seats than its current allocation and larger states get proportional representation may abolish the reason for the southern states’ rage.
They can also prosper some more by becoming more inclusive and appreciative of females and not treating them as misfits and outsiders in politics and in the markets. They could then go further and induct skilled northern labour to offset the gaps created by an ageing population and attain an enviable national popularity.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.