Prime Minister of India - Dr. Manmohan Singh

PM's speech on National Commission on Population Meet

"I welcome you all to this very important meeting of the National Commission on Population. At the outset, I must thank each one of you for accepting our invitation to be members of this very important Commission. We have an important national task to address and I urge everyone to pay the highest attention to the issues at hand.

One of the key challenges facing India today is stabilising our population. A population which stood at 36 crores in 1951 is now around 110 crores. Current trends indicate that it is expected to touch 140 crores by 2026. By all reckoning, we will end up as the world's most populated country in the next few decades. While we all can agree that human resource is an invaluable asset in economic and social development, there are limits to the population that our environment can sustain in the long run, particularly in view of our desire to achieve higher standards of living. Therefore, sustainability of development processes requires a degree of population stabilisation.

However, we must not mistake population stabilization to be population control. There is widespread consensus that population stabilization entails a holistic, comprehensive approach towards education and health care, particularly of our women and children. Investment in comprehensive health care, coupled with a wider development policy addressing the educational and economic needs of our population together with raising the social status of our women must be the key to any population stabilisation strategy. Improvement in health indicators must be understood to be interlinked with indicators for literacy, water supply, sanitation, nutrition, housing and incomes.

In this context, I believe that unless our population policy is integrated with our wider development policy, it can never achieve the objective of population stabilisation within a reasonable time frame. I draw your attention to the experience of states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh. The link between social and human development and demographic trends is obvious and too stark to ignore. I urge all political parties, social activists and policy makers in states with high population growth to study and learn from the experience of these states. This meeting offers us a unique opportunity to learn from these states which have served as a beacon in improving their demographic status through a multipronged approach.

There are three aspects of population policy that I wish to draw your attention to. In each of these three areas we need a national political and social consensus to move forward. Such a consensus can be generated by the distinguished members of this august Commission.

First, there has to be a concerted campaign focusing on issues related to welfare of girls and young mothers. We need to invest in educating the girl child and improving her health and social status. We need to empower adolescent girls and young women so that they can make informed choices about their lives and the size of their families. This empowerment played a critical role in accelerating the demographic transition not just in States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but across the world. Surveys indicate that even now, over half of our young women get married below the legal age of 18 years. They do not have information or easy access to contraception of any kind. This has contributed to the demographic pattern of "too early, too frequent and too many children." This is more prevalent in demographically weaker states. We need to address this problem.

Our Government is committed to the full social and economic empowerment of our women. We have already taken several steps, both legislative and administrative, to widen social opportunities and guarantee the economic rights of women. We are firm in our commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment. This is an important policy plank of our Government. You should have no doubt about our commitment in this regard.

We also need to understand the role played by families as an effective social safety net. In a country where credible social safety nets are absent, it is children who form the main pillar of support to their parents in their old age. This, coupled with high infant mortality rates, compels families to have more children. Having an effective old age care system along with a focused drive to reduce infant mortality will, I believe, reduce the incentives for having large families. Empowerment of women and a holistic approach to reproductive and child care will enable this to happen and I would want greater attention to be paid to this aspect.

Second, in addition to giving focused attention to the welfare of girl child and women, there has to be a concerted campaign to improve the health and educational status of the entire population in general. This is particularly important in the less developed regions of our country. While regional imbalances are inherent to large, continental countries, in our case the less developed regions also happen to be more densely populated and are critical determinants of the overall demographic status of our country. Unless we invest heavily on social infrastructure in these areas, and empower the poor, we cannot directly address the population challenge. It is, therefore, necessary to integrate our population policy with our health and education policy as well as a social empowerment policy.

Third, we have to pursue a more balanced policy of regional development so that adequate employment opportunities are made available in the more populated regions of the country. It cannot be a coincidence that the regions that have experienced a lower rate of economic growth are geographically identical to those with a higher rate of population growth. While analysts can debate whether it is development that enables the demographic transition, or the other way round, policy makers must deal with the reality of this imbalance.

This means we have to provide new employment opportunities in less developed regions. Since private investment tends to go to better developed regions, the government has to step in to help backward regions. Given the paucity of state level resources, we have set up a Backward Regions Grant Fund to augment development assistance in these regions. We are also launching the National Employment Guarantee programme to ensure livelihoods in these regions. Not only will these measures enhance employment opportunities and incomes and hence, have an effect on demographic trends, but they will also ensure a higher participation of women in our workforce. It is an accepted axiom that increased participation of women in the workforce will ensure an earlier demographic transition.

While the three pronged approach of focussed attention on women and girls, a general enhancement of educational and health levels and balanced regional development must be the core of any population stabilisation strategy, I would also like to draw attention to some aspects of our health programmes.

For far too long has the health sector been addressed through a series of vertical, disease based programmes. A focused, target driven family planning programme was another major programme with poor results. Underlying all this was a general programme to support primary health care. This vertical and horizontal fragmentation of health programmes, coupled with a target driven approach to population stabilisation in the past has distanced the entire gamut of health services from the aam aadmi who is the primary stakeholder in any service delivery programme. At the same time, a better understanding of health behaviour has led to a move away from targets to an integrated approach to family welfare. In this framework, it is essential to breakdown the disease centric walls in our health programmes and to increase the stakeholders' role in the management of health sector.

Our Government has launched the National Rural Health Mission to facilitate this holistic, participatory, decentralised approach to our people's health care. The Mission, which will function on the basis of a decentralised district plan for health care, will ensure stakeholder participation, enhanced investments and proper prioritisation. It will provide accessible, affordable, accountable, effective and reliable primary health care to the poor and vulnerable sections of the population so as to achieve the Goals of National Population Policy & National Health Policy. The Reproductive and Child Health Programme will be integrated into the Mission and become subsumed in it. I hope that this Mission does for our health care sector what the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is doing for our education sector. Our government is committed to increasing the resources committed to primary health care so that there is substantial improvement in all demographic and health indicators over the next five years. Some of our states have demonstrated that this is possible and we will certainly ensure that all other states achieve similar results.

The National Population Policy affirms the commitment of the Government towards voluntary and informed choice to citizens availing of reproductive health care services. The policy also reaffirms our commitment to a target free approach in administering family planning services. I would like to make it clear that our policy does not encourage incentives and disincentives as they have, at best, only a marginal impact and sometimes may even cause resentment and non-acceptance of the programme. I sincerely believe that coercion of any kind to achieve population stabilisation is unacceptable in a free society. Our Government's approach places fertility reduction in the broader context of evolving an effective development strategy that focuses its attention on elimination of poverty, empowerment of women and offers choice in limiting family size.

Population stabilisation is only one aspect of population policy. I do urge you to pay equal attention to the challenge of building capabilities of our people. No civilised society can regard any human being as a burden, a liability. Every one of us has a right to live a decent life. The challenge of population management is to empower people so that those who are perceived as liabilities can be effectively transformed into assets. A literate, gainfully employed and socially, culturally and economically productive person is a national asset. In a country of over a billion people, you can imagine what we can do for our nation by helping empower our people. Investing in human capabilities converts human liabilities into human assets. Therefore, even as our population policy focuses on population stabilisation, it must also focus on altering the skill profile of our population. This, in itself, can help in limiting population growth.

Our Government is committed to making the National Population Commission a more effective institution. Inviting each one of you to join this Commission was an important part of improving the effectiveness of this Commission. I urge you to devote your energies to a meaningful dialogue and suggest practical policy options for Government, the private sector, educational institutions and other civil society organisations. This is a national endeavour and we must all work together to improve the well-being of our people. The task is so stupendous that it will have to be given the shape of a mass national movement. The outcome of this movement is so important that all of us need to put in our very best. We owe all this to our coming generations. I wish your deliberations success."