Isn’t reaching out to women and improving their educational prospects a better way to control the population than forcing them to give up their reproductive rights?

One of the most difficult battles that Sabita Sethi had to fight when she decided to stand for ward elections in Odisha’s Khurda district was getting her husband’s consent. But although she won over her husband and  emerged victorious in the polls at Balianta block, Sethi had to pay a heavy price for success. She was forced to put up the youngest of her three daughters for adoption after objections were raised on the number of children she had. If she had not done so, Sethi would have been disqualified for violating the two-child eligibility criteria for contesting local Government polls in Odisha.

Sethi is not the only one forced to take such heartbreaking decisions. The political participation of women, primarily from marginalised communities, has been adversely affected by the two-child norm, introduced in India for local Government elections or panchayats in 1992.  Brought in to “control” the population by prohibiting people with more than two children from holding any post in panchayats and urban local bodies, the policy has violated the reproductive and human rights of women. If they are candidates, they have to abort or give up a child if they want to continue in their post or else they face disqualification. As spouses, they face desertion or forced abortion so that their husbands can contest. In both situations, it is the women who suffer.

With the minimum age for contesting  these elections lowered from 26 to 21 years, many more women in the reproductive age bracket have been negatively impacted in States like Gujarat, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra and Rajasthan which follow the two-child norm.

With the Assam Government announcing that those having more than two children will not be considered for Government jobs with effect from January 1, 2021, women in Assam can expect to meet a similar fate. Paradoxically this has been called the ‘Population and Women Empowerment Policy of Assam’ and the existing Government staff also has to follow it.

Does Assam really need to follow this policy? According to Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, this was necessary as the State registered a 16.93 per cent population growth in the last 10 years. A look at the official statistics shows the official birth rate of Assam came down to 22 in 2015 and to 21.7 in 2016. It is slightly higher than the national birth rate which was 20.4 in 2016. The birth rate is defined as the number of live births per 1,000 total population each year.

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Assam is 2.2 children per woman. TFR indicates the average number of children expected to be born to a woman during her reproductive span of 15-49 years. Interestingly, the State is almost at replacement level fertility of 2.1, that is the number of children needed to replace the parents, after accounting for fatalities, skewed sex ratio, infant mortality and so on. The population starts falling below this level.

Fertility has been on the decline in Assam. According to National Family Health Survey 4 (NFHS-4), in Assam, fertility decreased by 0.2 children in the 10 years between NFHS-3 and NFHS-4. In fact, fertility in urban areas, at 1.4 children per woman, is well below the replacement level and even in rural areas it is close to replacement levels at 2.3 children per woman.

Just like in the rest of the country, in Assam also there is a strong preference for sons and this has been underscored by the NFHS-4, which found that 18 per cent couples want more sons than daughters and only three to four per cent of women and men prefer to have daughters. In such a scenario, once the two-child policy comes into existence, Assam is most likely to go the Odisha way.

In Odisha, the deeply entrenched preference for sons led to increased discrimination against the girl child after the enforcement of the two-child norm on panchayat representatives. This reflected in worsening of the already declining child sex ratio in the State. From 953 girls for 1,000 boys in the age group of 0-6 years in the 2001 census, it dropped to 941 in the 2011 census.

The discrimination was evident in Sethi’s district Khurda, which incidentally has the lowest child sex ratio in Odisha. From 926 girls for 1,000 boys in 2001, it went down to 916 girls in the 2011 census. Women activists contend that the two-child norm has played a critical role in this decline.

Instead of implementing a coercive two-child policy, Assam should focus on improving its high Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR), Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Under  Five Mortality Rate (U5MR). In all these crucial areas, Assam fares worse than the national average. In 2016, it had the highest MMR in the country at 237 per lakh live births. The State’s IMR at 44 and U5MR at 52 are far higher than the national average of 33 and 37 respectively. It can also focus on evidence that shows that the proportion of women who start bearing children increases sharply to 21 per cent among women who are 18 years of age and to 32 per cent among women who are 19. Further, research has shown that women, who have had no schooling, are more than eight times as likely to start a family than women with 12 or more years of schooling.  In other words, at the current fertility rates, women with no schooling will have 1.2 children more than women who studied till high school or beyond. This means that uneducated women will have a TFR of 2.9 as compared to a TFR of 1.7 for those who studied till high school at least.

According to data, the IMR is 63 per 1,000 live births for teenage mothers. Also, children of uneducated mothers are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday as compared to children whose mothers have completed 10 or more years of schooling (NFHS 4).

So then, isn’t reaching out to young women and improving their educational prospects a better way to control the population and empower women, than putting them in a situation where they are forced to give up their reproductive rights?

Further, nearly 39 per cent of the births in the State occur within three years of the previous birth. Studies have shown that waiting at least three years between children reduces the risk of infant mortality.

But family planning in Assam is not popular and unplanned pregnancies are relatively common. However, if all women were to have only the number of children they wanted, the TFR would be considerably below the replacement level. It would be at 1.8 children per woman, instead of the current level of 2.2 children per woman. Moreover, by giving women the reproductive choice, the State could help India keep its promise as a signatory to the International Conference on Population and Development’s Programme of Action to enable couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.

But the contraceptive prevalence rate among the married women in the State in the age group 15-49 has come down from 57 per cent (NFHS-3) to 52 per cent (NFHS-4). Ironically, the unmet need for family planning has gone up to 14 per cent in 2015-16 (NFHS-4) from 11 per cent in 2005-06 (NFHS-3). So women who want to plan their families either don’t have access or the information to do so.

Statistics disaggregated by gender, play an important role in developing policies to achieve gender equality and foster inclusive development. It informs policies and interventions in areas like health, education and participation in decision making, politics and labour force. Already the national workforce participation rate for women is 25.51 per cent compared to 53.26 per cent for men. So how can there be women-led development when there is enough evidence to show that the two-child norm will only benefit and strengthen traditional structures of patriarchy that have always restricted women’s entry into public space?

(The writer is a senior journalist)