The Problems With Family Planning In India
India has always been suffering from a couple of problems whether they are related to health, education or unemployment and the issue of family planning has been one of them. It has become a serious problem because of increasing people’s choice of fertility, preference of having son in family rather than having a daughter and in growing trade labour rates. To begin with, the major reason that why the family size was increasing so rapidly was because of the increasing number of children in the family. The choice of family members was to have son so that he could look after the family in future. Moreover, he could handle the house responsibilities and will take care of his parents by becoming a pillar of the family. Secondly, people believed that if they will have many children, then they will work and can easily remove the financial conditions of the house. They will earn for themselves and for family members, thus removing a burden from their parent’s mind to look after them. So, they were forced to do labour and were prohibited from going to school. Their parents prefer money rather than sending them to study in school. Furthermore, people were scared about the domestic violence policy that was going on during that period. Parents considered that marrying their daughter is a huge burden on themselves because they feel that if they will have daughter, then they would have to get ready to give dowry to their daughter in order to make her in-laws happy and if the parents were unable to fulfil this wish then their daughter was made a part of violence in her entire life. To sum up, family planning has become a major problem. This issue was growing because of increasing gender inequality among children as daughters were not liked by parents. Their first preference was of having son so that he could look after his family in the whole life. They treat daughters unequal than sons. Boys were given more rights as compared girls.
References
- Chamarbagwala, R. , & Ranger, M. (2010). A Multinomial Model of Fertility Choice and Offspring Sex Ratios in India. Journal of Development Studies, 46(3), 417-438. https://doi. org/10. 1080/00220380903012755
- Koenig, M. A. , Ahmed, S. , Stephenson, R. , Jejeebhoy, S. J. , & Campbell, J. (2006). Individual and Contextual Determinants of Domestic Violence in North India. American Journal of Public Health, 96(1), 132-138. https://doi. org/102105/AJPH. 2004. 050872
- Rammohan, A. (2014). The trade-off between child labour and schooling in India. Education Economics, 22(5),484-510. https://doi. org/10. 1080/09645292. 2011. 641271
