InterPress News Service (IPS); Thursday, 6 November 1997.
Rahul Bedi

As part this renewed drive, officials of the health and family ministry plan to station condom-vending machines at airports and public toilets. Hotels will be asked to stack condoms along with toiletries in bathrooms and restaurateurs urged to distribute them after meals, along with the traditional betel nut and aniseed served complimentarily.

With 970 million people, India is already the world's second most populous nation after China, which has 1.2 billion people.

China has had an aggressive population control policy for nearly two decades, including a one-child policy that has drastically cut fertility in just one generation.

But in India, contraception is practised by only 40 percent of the 145 million people in the country's reproductive age group. Some 20 million people are added each year to India's population, so that the country is set to overake China as the world's most populous nation by the year 2020, some officials say.

The more widespread use of contraception methods like condoms would also make headway in curbing the spread of the HIV virus that causes AIDS, health officials say.

The World Health Organisation estimates HIV prevalence among adults between 15 and 49 years of age at .51 percent, or some 2.5 million people. But other estimates say the figure should be nearer the four million mark.

The United Nations Development Programme says there are likely to be one million people with AIDS and seven million HIV cases in India by the turn of the century, the largest numbers in the world.

But launching a more aggressive population policy is far from simple in a country where the subject has been a politically charged one for decades.

Still, Renuka Chowdhury, India's feisty health and family welfare minister, says the country needs a better planned, better implemented strategy for coping with the growing population. Why the fuss about publicly handling out condoms, she asks.

"There is more rubber in a ball than in a condom," Chowdhury said from her office, where a map of India made out of multi- coloured condoms is displayed.

India launched its family planning programme in 1952, but it has been upstaged by politicians who equate huge numbers of people with "vote banks" to be assiduously wooed during elections.

Forcible sterilisations during an Emergency declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, dealt a body blow to the family planning programme from which it has yet to recover.

So vicious and widespread were the forced sterilisations during the 19-month long Emergency that succeeding governments were forced to rename the ministry of family planning ministry the "family welfare" ministry instead.

Since that time, no politician or political party has dared to get involved in family planning work, believing it to be political suicide. Likewise, the large families of many Indian members of Parliament are not setting a good example for having smaller families.

A survey of the 1991 Lok Sabha (lower house) revealed that of 545 MPs, 111 had two children each -- the recommended national norm -- while the remainder had four to 10 offspring each or an average of seven children per member of Parliament.

Laloo Prasad Yadav, the former chief minister of Bihar, India's most backward state, has 12 children and strongly recommends large families to all his constituents, who are probably among the world's poorest people.

Such attitudes have given rise to demands by population experts and economists to delink family planning measures from politics and introduce mechanisms within the constitution to face the challenge of population growth.

Alarmed by India's galloping birth rate, the government recently appointed a 10-member expert committee to prepare a policy report on how to manage population growth better.

It came up with a draft of a national population policy that recommended the decentralisation of India's family planning programme and the improvement of overall standards of health, education and employment.

Instead of the vertically structured family planning programme that exists at present, the committee recommended that the government switch to decentralised planning. This localised approach would be executed by 'panchayats' and 'nagarpalikas', or locally elected village and town bodies supported by non- governmental organisations.

Experts say these policies need to be implemented urgently in the Hindi or 'cow belt' comprising the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. This whole region accounts for 40 percent of India's population and has an annual population growth rate of four per cent. It is also politically the most important, the poorest and the least literate region.

Apart from these social constraints to a more aggressive population programme, there are other problems, among others, in the area of pushing greater condom use. For instance, the health ministry has stopped the free distribution of condoms as many Indians believe that any handout had to be of doubtful quality. They are now sold for 10 paise or 28 U.S. cents each although some voluntary agencies continue with free distribution.

Measures have also been taken to end the misuse of condoms by toy makers, who officials found were melting them down to recover high quality latex for use in making a variety of other things. Condoms are now lubricated with silicon oil difficult to melt off.

Officials say around 450 million condoms, or almost half the total number produced every year and distributed, were used to plug radiator leaks in vehicles or were dyed and sold as balloons to children.

Experts with the National AIDS Control Organisation have also discovered that many people do not know how to use condoms, and have launched a campaign through NGOs to give demonstrations on their usage and disposal. (END/IPS/AP-PR/RB/RD/JS/97)

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