THE Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) has raised objections to incentivise the state public servants following the "One Child Norm" in the proposed bill on the population control released by the Uttar Pradesh law Commission. Alok Kumar, the Working President of the VHP, has sent a letter to the State Law Commission in this regard.
The first draft of the bill has proposed many incentives for the government employees preferring to have a single child including insurance and health care facilities till the age of 20, preference in admission in educational institutions, free education till graduation, and so on.
The VHP, in the letter also objected to the intention of the bill to bring the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to 1.7. The saffron organisation argued that the population of society stabilises only when the TFR is over 2, preferably 2.1. Total Fertility Rate is the number of children born to a woman in her reproductive life.
Explaining this further, the VHP said that if the TFR is 2.1, there are two children to replace their parents. The additional 0.1 provides for the possibility of some children dying before the reproductive age or similar other "wastage".
"In a contracting population, the ratio between the working-age and dependent population gets disrupted. There is a rise in the number of people that each working-age person has to take care of. In an extreme case, the one-child policy would lead to a situation where there is only one working-age adult to look after two parents and four grandparents."
Highlighting the adverse social impact of the Single Child Policy, VHP said that the single child may be socially less accommodative. It cited two reasons for this behaviour, first the single child doesn't learn to share due to the absence of siblings and second, being a single child they are extremely pampered by their parents and grandparents.
Citing the example of China, the letter further said, "In China, which adopted the one-child policy in 1980, this was called the 1-2-4 phenomenon. To get over it, China had to relax its One Child Policy for parents who were themselves, single children. It is said that in China, the One Child Policy was never applied to more than half of the prospective parents. Within about three decades, it had to be completely withdrawn."
The State's Law Commission has released the draft of the Uttar Pradesh Population(Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021 in the public domain. It has invited suggestions from the respondents by July 19.
The Hindutva organisation hence demanded the removal of Sections 5, 6(2) and 7 from the draft bill to avoid contraction of population.