Context:-
- Recently, the government of Uttar Pradesh released a “Population Policy” in which it stated its intention to bring the gross fertility rate in the State down from the existing 2.7 to 2.1 by 2026.
- To achieve this, the government says it will consider the enactment of a new piece of legislation-THE UTTAR PRADESH POPULATION (CONTROL, STABILIZATION AND WELFARE) BILL, 2021
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About the Law:-
- This draft law, titled the Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021, seeks to provide not only a series of incentives to families that adhere to a two-child norm, but also intends on disentitling families that breach the norm from benefits and subsidies.
- The draft Bill echoes the U.P. government’s new policy in claiming that the State’s ecological and economic resources are limited.
- According to it, unless population growth is regulated, the State will be unable to guarantee the provision of basic rights to all citizens.
Measure Proposed in the Law:-
- Incentive :- It promises public servants who undergo sterilisation and adopt a two-child norm several benefits. These include two increments during their service, subsidy towards the purchase of a house, maternity, or paternity leave, with full salary and allowances, as the case may be, for up to 12 months, and free health care and insurance coverage for the spouse.
- Disincentive:-A person who breaches the two-child norm will be debarred from securing the benefit of any government-sponsored welfare scheme and will be disqualified from applying to any State government job.
- Existing government employees who infringe the rule will be denied the benefit of promotion. And last, transgressing individuals will be prohibited from contesting elections to local authorities and bodies.
Is New Law a true answer to Population Control ?
It is worth pondering over whether regulation of population is necessary at all. But assuming such regulation is a legitimate governmental aim, the first question that we must ask of the new proposal is: why.
- After all, experiences from other States in India show us that there are more efficacious and alternative measures available to control the growth of population, including processes aimed at improving public health and access to education.
- Indeed, the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare conceded as much before the Supreme Court late last year. Through an affidavit filed in court, the central government argued that “international experience shows that any coercion to have a certain number of children is counter-productive and leads to demographic distortions”.
- The Government further confirmed that India was committed to its obligations under international law, including the principles contained in the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action, 1994.
Pledge on right:-
Foremost in those principles was a pledge from nations that they would look beyond demographic targets and focus instead on guaranteeing a right to reproductive freedom.Since then, in India, the Supreme Court of India has recognised this right as an inalienable promise.
In Suchita Srivastava & Anr vs Chandigarh Administration (2009), the Court found that a woman’s freedom to make reproductive decisions is an integral facet of the right to personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. “It is important,” the Court wrote, “to recognise that reproductive choices can be exercised to procreate as well as to abstain from procreating”.
This ruling was endorsed by the Supreme Court’s nine-judge Bench verdict in K.S. Puttaswamy vs Union of India (2017). A reading of the plurality of opinions there shows us that the Constitution sees a person’s autonomy over her body as an extension of the right to privacy. In his judgment, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud held that privacy partakes different connotations. These include decisional autonomy, which comprehends, among other things, liberty over “intimate personal choices such as those governing reproduction”. Justice S.K. Kaul similarly declared in his separate judgment that the right to procreation was an important constituent of “the privacy of the home”.
Like all other fundamental rights, the right to privacy is not boundless. But, as Puttaswamy clarifies, any restriction placed on the right must conform to a doctrine of proportionality. This requires
- first, that the limitation be rooted in statute;
- second, that the state show us that the objective of its law is founded on a legitimate governmental aim;
- third that there are no alternative and less intrusive measures available to achieve the same objective; and
- fourth, that there exists a rational connection between the limitation imposed and the aims of the statute.
The logic here is simple: in pursuing public interest, it is essential that governments ensure that individual liberties are encroached upon to the lowest degree possible. A simple reading of U.P.’s draft law will show us that, if enacted, it will grossly impinge on the right to reproductive freedom.
The government will likely argue that there is no violation of privacy here because any decision on sterilisation would be voluntary. But, as we ought to by now know, making welfare conditional is a hallmark of coercion. If we want the idea of India as a welfare state to mean something, the right to access basic goods cannot be made provisional on a person sacrificing her bodily autonomy.
By all accounts, therefore, the proposed law will fall foul of a proportionality analysis. If nothing else, the Union government’s concession in the Supreme Court demonstrates that there are several alternative, less-intrusive means available to regulate population.
Negative consequences
But the new proposal is also worrying because it is likely to bring with it a host of other deleterious consequences.
- For instance, an already skewed sex ratio may be compounded by families aborting a daughter in the hope of having a son with a view to conforming to the two-child norm.
- The law could also lead to a proliferation in sterilisation camps, a practice that the Supreme Court has previously deprecated.
- In Devika Biswas vs Union of India (2016), the Court pointed to how these camps invariably have a disparate impact on minorities and other vulnerable groups.
As is so often the case with bad laws in India, though, this draft Bill may find support from some past judgments of the Supreme Court. In this case, the Government may point to the judgment in Javed & Ors vs State of Haryana & Ors (2003), where the Court upheld a law that disqualified persons with more than two children from contesting in local body elections. But not only is the present proposal far more disproportionate — in that it virtually sanctions civil death for those that violate the norms it fixes — the judgment in Javed can no longer be seen as good law.
For one thing, its reasoning flies in the face of Puttaswamy. But as rousing as the nine-judge Bench verdict is, its legacy depends on how its findings are applied. For the judgment to have tangible value and meaning, any law of this kind, which invades upon our most personal and ethical choices, must be seen as repugnant to the Constitution.
Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 called for a promotion of reproductive rights, empowering women, universal education, maternal and infant health to untangle the knotty issue of poverty and high fertility. But rather than taking steps in this direction, the Government seems to have taken the beaten path of a mixture of incentives and penalties to tackle what is a socio-economic issue as a demographic one.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.