Poverty and population control / edited by Lars Bondestam and Staffan Bergström.

Date:
1980
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Poverty and population control / edited by Lars Bondestam and Staffan Bergström. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    112/248 (page 98)
    98 POVERTY AND POPULATION CONTROL Instead, however, of bringing about the long overdue structural changes to honour the commitment it had made to the masses of the population of the country, as early as in the mid-1950s, the political leadership actually used the threat of population explosion to justify perpetuation of the system. The bogey of population explosion was not only used as a very convenient alibi to explain away its failure to keep its promises to the masses, but was also used to justify launching, with very active inspiration, support, guidance and often naked pressure from foreign agencies, a mass campaign which was specifically directed towards curbing births. While the upper classes continued to thrive at the cost of the masses, the masses were told that their lot could not be improved unless the population growth was curbed. Propitiation of the privileged classes at the cost of gross neglect of the social and economic interests of the vast masses of the people, however, created one problem for the rulers. It generated amongst the masses a negative attitude towards family planning. To these people life is virtually an unending chain of misery, degradation and deprivation. They have no economic choice open to them, nothing to look forward to. A surplus of fresh human stock is the only tangible capital that can be invoked. They have thus no stake in the survival of the system and, therefore, no stake in curbing births. Indeed, it would not be too cynical to say that, if anything, these oppressed people have a positive stake in the destruction of what is to them a tyrannical system which causes them so much misery. They have little to lose if the system is blown up by a population explosion. Also, they have much to look forward to from the alternative political system that will emerge after the explosion. In the early phases of the programme, attempts were made to overcome this negative attitude by launching campaigns to persuade people to accept family planning through education and motivation and mass communication. Recourse was taken to coercion and enticement following the failure of the persuasive methods. Failure of one coercive tactic to overpower people's resistance led to adoption of successively more intensive methods of coercion for attaining sterilization targets—coercion went up from mere monet¬ ary enticements, to employment of touts to procure cases for sterilization camps, to putting administrative pressure on health and family planning workers to deployment of the law and order and tax