But we can't have the alternative that's worked everywhere that's tried it: educating Women. If that happened the pervasive corruption might be questioned.
Instead we'll just kill the extra children.
Instead we'll just kill the extra children.
The only intervention supported by data is providing and mandating access to good education, jobs, birth control and enforcing legal rights to women. Nothing else even comes close.
This policy is being proposed in UP, which performs very poorly on women's equality compared to higher GDP states.
All they have to look at the birth rates in southern states with high education outcomes for women - Kerala,Karnataka and TN
1) educating women must take at least ten years to show up in birth rates
2) women with fewer children might have an easier time educating themselves & getting the snowball going
It is easy to say educate women but when there are so many women less resource/finance it is hard to scale. This policy will help educating women in a sense that there is incentive.
The draft is not about killing extra children but its about preventing the birth. The draft says it will even provide free education to single child. The policy also says it provides incentive to family that follows the rule. Those who don't follow simply wont get incentive.
I think this is correct way to handle population. India is largely overpopulated anyway. And there is constant pressure on resource.
And lastly, its not like China policy where someone is forced. India is democratic country and I think this is a good policy at least on paper. Regarding implementation we will see in future.
There are many problems in life that are hard. The difficulty level of the problem can not be used an excuse. You can decide to avoid tackling hard problems and let someone else take care of it if it's "too hard".
> I think this is correct way to handle population. India is largely overpopulated anyway. And there is constant pressure on resource.
What number would make India "not so populated"? How do you come up with this number?
History has taught us that when decisions are made largely based on ideological / moral concerns, that connection with reality is severed and the outcome tends to be, as one would expect, negative if not entirely catastrophic.
This was an important aspect of the world we live in 100 years ago, but it is even more so today, because system complexity and degree of non-linear effects has increased exponentially. Humans are not in any way able to change the system they live in, top-down, regardless of how many of them -still- indulge in this sort of magical thinking. Rather, they should strive to first understand the (localized) parts of the system that directly surround them, and then effect change from the bottom-up, in harmony with the rules and flows of that systemic environment.
In other words, realpolitik should be the order of the day.
Too hard within context of current Indian institutional capabilities, and more importantly requires generations to pay off / take too long. Necessary long term goal, but doesn't avert 400M+ projected Indian births in an already overpopulated country that needs to maintain above 8% growth just to keep up with employment. Which they're not meeting. For reference height of PRC / China export manufacturing only supported ~400M jobs. Automation + geopolitics means India completely missed out prospect of concentrating global manufacturing. There's not much on the horizon but continuing with massive subsistent agriculture with massive idle / under / unemployment. High TFR + poverty + inadequate growth = generating more net unemployment and instability every year, which cause more governance problems = overpopulation spiral.
Family planning is a viable stop gab that's relatively enforceable, immediately. It's a band aid solution paid in later demographic bomb that may or may not be averted / mitigated with development or technology. Status quo is geometric poverty population growth that's going to hit carrying capacity of geography. 100s of millions of excessed impoverished people that will drag development. For context PRC one child policy averted 300M+ births, even now 600M of country is barely middle income. There are just too many people. Sure a demographic bomb coming but it's better to manage a demographic bomb with high wealth per capita. World needs heterodox policies to address end of population driven social and economic structures. India needs to prevent 100s millions more births ASAP and hope some of these policies work.
By your logic, if we needed more babies you would stop educating women ? Education and baby making are orthogonal issues.
Stopping to educate women and limiting our ability to make own decisions would probably made women have less children. It would however be unethical, cruel and oppressive.
Educating women is one possible way to deal with the issue, that doesn't mean it is the _only_ way. Like someone else said, it will take at least a generation for effects to kick in. On the other hand, the policies that the article refers to can be effective immediately (and also applied together with other measures such as educating women).
Also, there is no binary thinking involved in what I wrote. This effect is real and repeated itself multiple times.
Hyperbolic much? I agree there might be better ways but everything mentioned only has incentives and seems like a much lighter version of the Chinese policy.