India's Population: Aspects of Quality and Control

Book excerpt: There is enough justification for the assumption that while the family planning programme must be quick ended in pace, other nationwide synergistic social and economic programmes must be intensified simultaneously to obtain greater mileage out of the programmes of population control. Without such concurrent, supportive measures the success of population control as a one-shot measure, operated however vigorously over a short span of time is very likely severely to backfire, as indeed it did in the beginning of 1977. Measures to improve the quality of population to the point where the support for tight control measures could be easily generated, are inexpensive and possible at the present level of India’s economic development, provided the ground is cleared for greater public involvement in the welfare and economic programmes through greater vertical decentralization and horizontal spread. The country would never scrape up the financial and other resources to achieve all these targets within the foreseeable future if the programmes continued to be based on standard governmental norms of expenditure, outfit and per capita performance, but could possibly overfulfil the targets if the right type of motivational and organizational effort is mounted to build up on the social deployment of surpluses of human energy and enterprise for community needs.