Neighbouring Telangana is expected to follow suit amid the population control debate, weeks after Andhra Pradesh abolished its “two-child policy,” which prohibited anybody with more than two children from running for local body elections.
According to a top government source, Telangana, which was a part of undivided Andhra Pradesh till 2014, will need to change its Panchayat Raj Act, 2018 in order to repeal the policy. A file in this regard will shortly be given to the state Cabinet.
“There is enough evidence that shows we are moving towards a time when the population of the state will age. It is now time to reverse a few family planning measures which were implemented earlier,” the senior government official said and added that by 2047, Telangana would “need more youngsters or children to be around”.
“Telangana too thinks it should be equipped to deal with an increase in the state’s elderly population,” the official said.
N Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, had already said that his administration will offer incentives to those with more children—a practice that has been embraced by a number of European countries. Concerns regarding low birth rates and an elderly population were also mentioned by Andhra Pradesh when it decided to repeal the policy. Last month, K Parthasarathy, the state minister of information and public relations, declared that Andhra’s total fertility rate (TFR) was pitifully low.
“While the national TFR is 2.11, it is only 1.5 in the state. This could affect the productivity of the state in the long run,” he said.
Demographers claim that repealing the policy won’t stop the ageing process, but the Telugu states’ actions are linked to population-based delimitation, which is anticipated to be implemented in 2026.
Southern states, which have done a better job of implementing family planning and have been furious with the Centre for giving them a “raw deal” on tax devolution, are afraid that the delimitation will result in fewer Lok Sabha seats than North India, which would lessen their political significance.
Concerns about the elderly population and falling reproduction rates are not unique to Naidu. In an interview, K T Rama Rao, the working president of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), stated that he had encouraged the Centre “not to punish” southern states for effectively implementing family planning.
“I hope the Centre does not resort to misadventures with the number of seats, which must be increased based on economic performance … Injustice in the form of delimitation will not be tolerated and the people of the southern states will come out together against it,” he said.
Close on the heels of Naidu’s remarks in October on the need for people to have more children, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin, referring to an old Tamil blessing, said: “That blessing doesn’t mean beget 16 children … But now a situation has arisen where people think they should literally raise 16 children and not a small and prosperous family.”
At a gathering in Nagpur on Sunday, however, RSS chairman Mohan Bhagwat urged a three-child policy and expressed grave concern over the population drop. “The population policy of our country, which was decided in 1998 or 2002, has stated that the growth rate should not go below 2.1. This means we need more than two children, that is three,” he said and added that if the growth rate falls below 2.1, our society “will perish on its own”.
When it was discovered that population control efforts between the 1981 and 1991 censuses were not producing the desired results, the “two-child policy” was established.
As a result, the National Development Council (NDC) established a committee, led by K Karunakaran, the chief minister of Kerala at the time, to recommend that anyone with more than two children be prohibited from holding positions in the government, ranging from the panchayat level to the Parliament. A number of states later implemented the guidelines.
Thirteen states in all had enacted the policy. The first states to adopt it were Rajasthan in 1992, Andhra Pradesh (then undivided), and Haryana in 1994.
Telangana will become the sixth state in the nation to repeal the program if it were to be abandoned. It was abandoned in 2005 by Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, but Andhra Pradesh just reinstated it.
