Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Nara Chandrababu Naidu, has exhorted people to have more children before it is too late to repent. Naidu is not normally known for making out-of-the-box statements of this nature. He is not the type who speaks impulsively without applying his mind. He is perhaps the only Chief Minister in the country to have made such an appeal.
In the 1950s and 1960s, having at least three children was the norm, with some women bearing as many as ten children. Today, that is not only impossible but almost unimaginable. Even having two children appears difficult for many families. Households with ten children once proudly referred to themselves as a cricket team, while the present two-child norm resembles a table tennis team.
Rewind a bit and one will recall what Indira Gandhi’s second son, Sanjay Gandhi, did during the Emergency. Sanjay Gandhi aggressively intensified the sterilisation programme in 1976, making it the central and coercive pillar of his Five-Point Programme. State officials were given strict quotas, and non-compliance often resulted in punitive measures such as withheld salaries, blocked irrigation water supplies and denial of ration cards. The drive peaked in the latter half of 1976 before being abruptly halted in early 1977.
This writer, then a 20-year-old, vividly remembers the agony expressed by his uncles, who were teachers in Ongole, and how they literally cried over their inability to meet sterilisation targets. That was another extreme. During that period, China was ahead of India in population. Copulation and population were the rhyming words that ruled the roost in India. The great writer Sri Sri captured the agony of unemployed educated youth in the film Aakali Rajyam through a song that blamed parents for failing to control their sexual urges and giving birth to children whom they were unable to employ or make employable.
Coming back to Naidu’s proposal of an incentive of Rs. 30,000 for a third child, increasing to Rs. 40,000 for a fourth child, it has not been received with much enthusiasm. Rather, it has drawn criticism, with leaders such as Brinda Karat raising serious objections and arguing that a woman’s right over her womb is non-negotiable.
As an elderly statesman and one of the most experienced Chief Ministers and politicians in the country, Naidu is not entirely misplaced in his observations. His argument is rooted in the declining Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Andhra Pradesh. From a layman’s perspective, a visit to hotels, factories, shops, malls or temple towns reveals that the number of local Andhra workers is steadily dwindling, increasingly replaced by migrants from Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Odisha and Jharkhand.
Leave alone four children; many couples today find even two children difficult to manage, while a growing number are content with just one child. Ironically, both Naidu and his son Nara Lokesh followed the one-child norm that became common in urban India and China during their respective times.
Modern-day couples do not hesitate to legally adopt an orphan rather than have a biological child. Such decisions are often made as part of their shared life plans. For some, adoption comes first and biological parenthood later, if at all.
Many feel that Naidu is attempting to undo one of South India’s greatest achievements — population control — without realising that the success of that policy has now created a different challenge. Because South India cooperated wholeheartedly with government efforts to control population growth, Naidu believes it should not now be penalised for its success. Hence his appeal for more births.
Middle-class families remain unconvinced that a one-time incentive can offset the enormous cost of raising, educating and feeding children in today’s economy. Lower-income families may respond favourably, but could later struggle with the long-term costs of healthcare and education.
Gen Z, meanwhile, argues that governments should encourage the adoption of children languishing in hundreds of orphanages. Both the Centre and the States, they contend, should liberalise adoption procedures while providing attractive incentives, quality healthcare and educational support.
Now that India has overtaken China in population, the country continues to grapple with the problem of plenty, albeit unevenly distributed. At the same time, many are unwilling to increase family size merely to satisfy demographic considerations linked to future political representation through delimitation.
Naidu’s contention that South India should not be punished for faithfully following the Centre’s family-planning slogan of “Hum Do, Hamare Do” is therefore not entirely without merit.
With its vast population, India possesses an enormous reservoir of human capital — a source of envy for many countries where AI-driven automation and robots are increasingly replacing human labour. The challenge before India is to channelise this human resource effectively so that the country benefits from its demographic strength. That, however, requires governments to ensure that citizens are employable and globally competitive.
It is perhaps time for a fresh national debate on how best to harness and channelise India’s greatest asset — its human capital.
