Foreign News: Every Day Is Baby Day

To cope with India’s surplus baby crop.

Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur thought she had one answer. The Health Ministry provided women with simple sets of beads and showed them how to keep track of the rhythm—green beads for “safe” days, black beads for “baby” days (TIME, Jan. 17).

But last week, after encountering an array of difficulties, Minister Kaur announced ruefully that the bead program had failed. Some women discarded the beads as too similar to those worn by cows. Others, from the depths of their faith in the Health Ministry, believed in the beads as a magic charm against conception. One chief trouble, as it turned out, was too many babies who just loved to play with mother’s beads and disrupt her calculations.