The following is in response to a recent judgement of the Supreme Court on October 25, 2018, which upheld the dismissal of a former sarpanch from his post for having three children. Minasingh Majhi of Nuapada, Odisha, had got elected in February 2002 and was disqualified from his post by the Orissa High Court after the birth of his third child in incumbency in August 2002.
Also adding intensity and earnestness to this renewed effort inviting attention of thinkers and policymakers alike is the recent resolution of the Odisha State Assembly for reserving 33% of seats in Assemblies and Parliament for women. Welcoming this affirmative step for women’s enhanced leadership at higher levels; this note also seeks to share concerns relating to the extent of empowerment actually enabled of women if policy guidelines do not reflect the intentions of the government.
While the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments paved the way for women and those from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes to participate in local self-governance as panchayat representatives, the two-child norm clause was inserted into the Orissa Gram Panchayat Act as an election conditionality, debarring those having more than two children from contesting elections. Intended as a measure to control population growth by making role models of panchayat representatives, this unfortunately has proved to be one of the biggest obstacles to citizens’ free choice and political participation in grassroots democracy.
The norm is not only coercive in nature impinging on basic human rights principles; it is also patently discriminatory as only elected Panchayati Raj representatives are penalised, and among them, only those who have more than two children after 1994. It is not only beyond presumable that panchayat representatives with relatively lower education, poor socioeconomic status cannot influence decisions of other citizens compared to their powerful Assembly or Parliament counterparts. The norm patently seeks to disallow a sizable section of the rural youths particularly from their democratic rights through a cutoff date for having children instead of addressing socioeconomic factors and a son-preference culture responsible for the rural poor having more children.
A chief argument in favour of the norm is the need to control the growing population. However if we look at the Total Fertility Rate between 2014 and 2016, the rural and urban rates stand at 2.0 and 1.6, respectively, which are lower than the national average at 2.5 (rural) and 1.8 (urban). Moreover, even though the rural rate is higher than the urban, this gap can be narrowed further through access to better healthcare and reproductive health support, viable and inclusive livelihood opportunities, increase in wages and improved education facilities to the rural poor.
Of particular concern to the Government should be that this norm violates several Constitutional rights of citizens apart from national and international conventions. Infringing Articles including 14, 15, 16, 21, 29, 42 and 47 of the Constitution which safeguard several aspects of life, liberty and equality of citizens, the norm also violates certain international conventions that India is a signatory to, some of them being CEDAW Article 12 (Health), Article 14 (which focuses on rural women) and Article 16 (family, reproductive health, etc). This effectively defeats not just the objectives of the 73rd Amendment but also that of the Odisha State Policy for Girls and Women-2014 which envisions. among others, “a State where girls and women have equal opportunities in all spheres of life, enjoy health and wellbeing and participate in social, political and economic spheres taking on leadership and decision-making roles…” Moreover, even though this policy document also lists strategy and action points, among others, to “remove any discriminatory practices that prohibit or restrict women to participate effectively”…and to promote and protect participation of women in existing community level decision making institutions and systems…”, sadly no step towards rescinding this discriminatory norm has been initiated by the Government yet.
Used more as a powerful tool to settle personal and political scores, instances recur in every panchayat term of blackmail and threats to unseat women and men representatives from vulnerable sections if they do not follow dictates of vested interests.
Another widely-prevalent but little-reported factor has been the unanimous rejection of this norm in tribal areas where most people have more than two children and, hence, nobody complains against any representative on the basis of this norm. So, this essentially deflates any claim of such a clause helping make role models out of Panchayati Raj representatives!
In light of all this, therefore, there is a need for immediate removal of the two-child norm from the Orissa Gram Panchayat Act as it does not serve the purpose that it originally was intended for. In the run-up to the 2017 panchayat elections in Odisha, the Government repealed a clause that had similarly restricted people who were speech and hearing-impaired and those cured of leprosy and tuberculosis from contesting the elections. So, why not remove the two-child norm also? Is it such a dreadful disease to have more than two children? Or is it more worthwhile to plug the systemic lacunae reinforcing the rural poor’s anxieties and helplessness in maintaining a small family?
(The writer works for The Hunger Project, Bhubaneswar. Mob: #9238501948.)
