The Pros of a Child Limit in India Should India implement a child limit?
It was implemented more effectively in urban environments, where much of the population consisted of small nuclear families who were more willing to comply with the policy, than in rural areas, with their traditional agrarian extended families that resisted the one-child restriction. In addition, enforcement of the policy was somewhat uneven over time, generally being strongest in cities and more lenient in the countryside. The country’s fertility rate and birth rate both decreased after 1980; the Chinese government estimated that some 400 million births had been prevented. Because sons were generally favoured over daughters, the sex ratio in China became skewed toward men, and there was a rise in the number of abortions of female fetuses along with an increase in the number of female babies killed or placed in orphanages. The number of people living below poverty line is 22% of the population in India (United Nations). According to the Reserve Bank of India, India’s percentage in poverty is way over the world average.
- Some of these included access to government services, better employment opportunities, higher wages, longer maternity leave, quality childcare, and better housing.
- The main driver of these trends is the fertility level in the two nations, said John Wilmoth, Director of the UN Population Division.
- As a result, would help slow down the exacerbating global warming and the consequences that come with it.
- Population control can help reduce carbon emission in India and help alleviate climate change.
- What’s more, built into many of these policies are incentives for families to have just one child.
In some places in China, couples were able to get a permit so they would not have to pay the fee. Because most families would not be able to afford the fee, women were often forced to have an abortion.[1] There were punishments for those who had a second child. However, if the first child were to be a female, the couple could try to have a second child, in hopes of a male child. Since it was started in 1979, the policy has prevented 400 million births from happening.[2] About 36% of the Chinese population is affected by the rule.[3] The policy does not apply in some areas, such as Hong Kong, Macau or Tibet. Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations. These calls have less to do with demographic reality, and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist concerns around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility.
India ranks the first in poverty percentage (United Nations).This is a huge number and most likely caused by lack of resources for the huge population that India has. After the implementation of the one child policy, it has alleviated poverty by promoting family planning, holding population growth under control and raising the life quality of the population in those areas. According to the National Bureau of Statistics in China, the poverty proportion in China has decreased from 35% in 1978 to 15% in 1985, and there is a continuous decrease in the poverty proportion (see Fig. 1). As too many births links to economic and cultural backwardness, population in India should be controlled to combat poverty. The one-child policy prompted the growth of orphanages in the 1980s.[179] For parents who had “unauthorized” births, or who wanted a son but had a daughter, giving up their child for adoption was a strategy to avoid penalties under one-child restrictions.
Should India Have a One Child Policy?
Families debated the social and economic stability of the household prior to conception. Population control can help reduce carbon emission in India and help alleviate climate change. Carbon emission means the carbon dioxide emission due to certain human activities. India is among the top 5 countries with the highest carbon emission in the world. According to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research created by the European Commission and Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in 2015, India ranks number 4 in the world in carbon emission, with up to 2.5 million carbon dioxide (kt) emission in 2015 (see Fig. 2).
The downsides of a one-child policy could outweigh any benefit in terms of reducing carbon emissions
They also fill the “parent-as friend” role more strongly, given the absence of siblings. But you’ve probably noticed it already, if not in your own or extended family, then one child policy india in your neighbourhood, among your former batchmates and current colleagues. Most people in India lack the means to be “unemployed” – in the work force but without a job.
Savings rate
In 2000, the fertility rate was still a relatively high 3.3 children per woman. Furthermore, India’s economy was growing 6% per year in the years leading up to 2019, more than enough to support modest population growth. China has found that despite reversing course, it cannot undo this rapid demographic transition. Urban, middle-class couples face mounting financial pressure, including the cost of raising children and of caring for the elderly. While the government has encouraged “high quality” urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children.
There have been cases where women with many children try and run for political office, only to be turned away because of laws they didn’t know about. There are already well-documented problems with China’s one-child policy. Worst of all, there is a gender imbalance resulting from a strong preference for boys. Millions of undocumented children were also born to parents who already had one child. These problems could come to India with the implementation of a two-child policy.
In turn, these motivations are related to rising parental aspirations for children and for their own consequent social mobility (analogous to explanations for fertility decline in the 1970s and 1980s in China – Greenhalgh 1988). Furthermore, this expansion of aspirations can be related to the nature of the rapid economic growth in the country. This growth has opened up the possibility of very high returns on education, but only for a few. That is, as employment opportunities have not kept pace with educational growth competition for scarce jobs increases. In a recent paper, Basu and Desai (2016) demonstrate that there is in fact an interesting sub-section of the Indian population that seems to have stopped childbearing after one child. Furthermore, they have done so without any encouragement or pressure from government policy and in spite of being surrounded by people who want and celebrate two or more births – and even sometimes four or more births.
A significant sliver of the middle class — urban, well educated, well-paid — is choosing to have just one child, even when that one is a girl (unusual in a country with a strong bias for male children). They are a visible presence in the 41 percent of society that is still in agriculture, and they carry nearly all of the household https://1investing.in/ burdens. But so long as these women remain outside the formal work force, they cannot enter its most productive categories, in industry and services. Improved access to family planning, better education, efforts to change societal attitudes and measures to ensure women’s safety could help more women take on formal work.
In China, the one-child policy has been successfully implemented and it has helped lower population growth. According to United Nations, after the Chinese government introduced the one-child policy, the fertility rate dropped. It dropped from around 4.6 births per woman in 1979 to 1.5 births per woman in 2010. The rate seems very low, but the data was stretched by the low rate in South India. The fact is that in North India, the fertility rate is way over 5 births per woman, which is as high as the mean the African countries with the highest fertility (Roser). If the policy is implemented, it can readily control the fertility rates and suppress the aggravated problem of overpopulation.
The result of the policy was a general reduction in China’s fertility and birth rates after 1980, with the fertility rate declining and dropping below two children per woman in the mid-1990s. Those gains were offset to some degree by a similar drop in the death rate and a rise in life expectancy, but China’s overall rate of natural increase declined. At the same time, India’s current fertility rate – two births per woman – is just below the replacement threshold of 2.1, the level required for population stabilization in the long run in the absence of migration, says the UN report.
Calls for a ‘one-child policy’ in India are misguided at best, and dangerous at worst
These steps included messages preaching the importance of family planning. There was one such of these messages that was a sign put up in Tang Shan that read, ‘For a prosperous and powerful nation and a happy family, please use birth planning’. There were also incentives and rewards for those who only had one child, which continued through the one-child policy. Some of these included access to government services, better employment opportunities, higher wages, longer maternity leave, quality childcare, and better housing. Beyond the exceptions, if a couple wanted to have more than one child, they must pay money to the government.
The gentle slope of the demographic curve propelling India into first place looks enviable to the many developed nations that are rapidly aging. Indians are living longer, and the number of babies being born each year has barely budged. Unlike China, which is facing the hangover of its decades under the one-child policy, India faces no steep drop-off and accompanying economic and social dangers. At other times, the single-child family is a subject of interest for countries with very low fertility.