India

India defeats most of those who try either to understand or to change it. Part of the difficulty of trying to understand it is the legacy of past writing. The more you read, the more you must doubt the very possibility of taking a genuinely objective view of the country. There is a curious unchangingness about the sub-continent; even visually it seems to look as it has always been portrayed. The eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings of Daniell or Chinnery convey impressions of an India almost completely familiar to one who comes to it a hundred or more years later. Does it really change so little? Or are our perceptions conditioned? Such questions come particularly to mind in relation to India’s population. Consider the following quotation:

Before I quit the subject of Delhi, I will answer by anticipation a question which I am sensible you wish to ask, namely, what is the extent of the population of that city, and the number of its respectable inhabitants, as compared with the capital of France? When I consider that Paris consists of three or four cities piled upon one another, all of them containing numerous apartments, filled, for the most part, from top to bottom; that the streets are thronged with men and women, on foot and horseback; with carts, chaises, and coaches; and that there are very few large squares, courts, or gardens; reflecting, I say, upon all these facts, Paris appears to me the nursery of the world, and I can scarcely persuade myself that Delhi contains an equal number of people.

In 1976 the Government of India launched a new National Population Policy designed to achieve a rapid reduction in the birth rate. Much of it involved direct intervention attempting to cut across traditional fertility behaviour. To provide an understanding of those traditions is the aim of this section and the whole subject of family planning is left until Chapter 3. Indian society is so complex that no one would expect any straightforward account of fertility there — difficult as it is to account for the level of fertility anywhere. Most of our explanations derive from studies of differential fertility. As we have seen Indian fertility is not above average, internationally speaking, among developing countries. But it has been high relative to India’s needs in recent decades as well as to levels prevailing in rich countries. A standard account would run as follows: ‘Fertility has its basis in history — a response to past high levels of mortality. If it has not declined much in the recent past, that is because a number of other contributory factors continue to favour high fertility: the age at marriage is low; Hindus need sons to light their funeral pyres; various religions in India, while not prohibiting contraception, may give a disposition to high fertility; parents need children to look after them in old age; they often see immediate economic or social advantage in large families.

Many national family planning programmes have two strands in their history: a concern for health, in particular the health of mothers and children, and a concern for the socio-economic effects of rapid population growth. Until recently proponents of family planning, feeling reticent about the latter, often tended to disguise their views by speaking in public mainly about the former. Both these strands have been present in India’s family planning history. The very first family planning clinic in India was opened in Bombay in 1925 by Prof. R. D. Karve who lost his post at the Christian Missionary College because of his ‘advanced’ views; but the first well-known public advocacy of family limitation was due to Pyare Kishen Wattal in 1916, to whose far-sighted book we have already referred. He put the argument in both health and socio-economic terms, as did the National Planning Committee of the Indian National Congress which, under Nehru’s chairmanship, also supported family planning. These early days were marked by one particular debate, namely how family limitation was to be achieved. Gandhi favoured abstinence; but those who supported contraception rapidly gathered strength.¹

India at Independence inherited an economy whose main features reflected two centuries of subservience to British interests and, particularly in the twentieth century, the development of its own capitalism. The economic task of the new Congress government was to set India on the path of a different style of economic progress which would at long last relieve its people from millennia of poverty and make India internationally respected and truly independent. The years prior to Independence witnessed many political conflicts on economic policy both within and outside the Congress party — the relative roles of the state and the private sector, of heavy and small scale manufacturing (on which Nehru and Gandhi were in some degree of opposition), of industry and agriculture. Most of these conflicts were unresolved when the first moves towards planning were made — and to some extent they still are.

Economic development of a kind which raises the material conditions of life not of some, but of all, has not been occurring in India. Government planning and policy have not brought it about; nor has it happened spontaneously. It is the thesis of this book that both the population and the development problems of India have essentially the same solution-employment-intensive growth which must in the early stages at least be predominantly rural. That this has been prevented fundamentally by the alignment of social, political and economic forces at every level in the country is neither a novel nor a radical thesis. Some would say it is not even a true one and would give more emphasis in explaining failures of development to such factors as religion, climate, native character and mores. But, while it is not possible to deny their relevance, few scholars who have examined Indian development in any depth would attribute the major share of causal significance to them.¹ Examples are not legion of Indian cultivators or businessmen voluntarily foregoing highly profitable opportunities free from excessive risk, in recent times at least. While popular views dwell on those aspects of the Hindu religion which stress resignation and self-denial, it is less often remembered that injunctions to asceticism are in the main confined to the later stages of life and that, in earlier stages, the search for prosperity is virtuous in the householder.