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India's experts to debate how to slow down population explosion |
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July 22, 2000
NEW DELHI (AP) - India's billionth baby, Aastha Arora, has never had a quiet moment since she was born May 11. Every day, journalists show up unannounced at her cramped, one-bedroom house in a crowded neighborhood to see the icon of India's rising population. Since Aastha's widely covered birth at a New Delhi hospital on May 11, another 3.5 million babies have been born in India. On Saturday, the National Population Commission - which was set up on the day Aastha was born - will meet in the capital to discuss how to slow down India's population clock. The group will review the national population policy, promote synergy among health, environment and educational programs and promote better coordination among states. To show how serious the problem is, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself is heading the commission, which includes chief ministers of India's 31 states and federal territories. Together they account for 16 percent of the world's population. In 1952, India launched a national program to stabilize its population, the first nation to do so. But planners paid little or no attention to population growth. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, pooh-poohed Western concerns about growth, often telling them that India's strength was its population. India's family planning program suffered a major setback in the mid 1970s when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a nationwide emergency. Her son, Sanjay, used the government powers to launch a mass sterilization program in which thousands of people were forced to undergo vasectomy and tubectomy operations. Across India, from crowded cities to sparsely populated villages, sterilization is now regarded as a dirty word. With half of India's population illiterate, misconceptions about contraception abound. Most men, government surveys have found, fear that they will become weak after sterilization. Volunteers find it difficult to persuade men to head to nearby hospitals to undergo a free vasectomy operation, which takes less than five minutes. That puts the burden on women to take care of contraception. With illiteracy higher among women than among men and access to contraceptives difficult, India's population clock continues to tick rapidly. Experts now worry that if India does not check growth, it will overtake China in 45 years to become the most populous country in the world. While global population has increased threefold this century, from 2 billion to 6 billion, India's population rose five times. That could create problems in promoting sustainable development with more equitable distribution of resources, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Saturday's meeting will discuss the unmet needs for contraception, health care infrastructure and how to care for pregnant mothers and children. In New Delhi's crowded Najafghad neighborhood, Aastha is a minor celebrity. A narrow, stone paved lane flanked by open sewers, leads to her house. Cows and buffaloes look for scraps; flies buzz in the air. The area is typical of many towns and villages across India, where public hygiene is poor, resulting in high infant mortality. A woman flings open the wooden door and after briefly glancing at the visitors, shouts in Hindi across a courtyard: "Journalists! To see Aastha!" A thin woman emerges from a room, cradling a chubby girl in a white dress. "She just woke up," says Anjana Arora, trying to coax a smile from her daughter for the photographer. Unlike millions of other children across India, Aastha is lucky: a pediatrician from the government's Safdarjung Hospital, where she was born, visits her every two weeks to monitor her growth and check her mother's health. Aastha also has brought good luck to her family. Donors, including the United Nations Population Fund, have contributed 200,000 rupees (dlrs 5,000) for her education. "She doesn't cry much. She drinks her milk without a fuss. ... No problems of any kind," her mother says. "She's a good baby." |