Foreign News: Improvident Maternity

More than one-seventh of the world’s entire population lives in India. There are more Indians than there are Americans and Russians put together, more people in India (357 million) than there are in all of Europe outside Russia. And still 5,000,000 more Indians are born every year. To provide even a substandard diet for its people, the Indian government must import some 3,000,000 tons of grain each year.

Last week, citing these and other grim statistics as determined by the government’s 1951 census, India’s Census Commissioner and a top civil servant, R. A. Gopalaswami, urged his countrymen to do something about “improvident maternity.” As things are now going, he estimates that India’s population will soar to 520 million by 1981. “Every married couple can have a maximum of three children without creating a national problem,” said Gopalaswami, “but we should realize that it is improvident on our part to permit ourselves to increase in numbers indefinitely without taking thought of how our children and our children’s children are to live.” More than 40% of recorded births are to parents who already have three children (compared to 21% in the U.S.), so it is these parents whose “improvident maternity” worries the census taker. To Gopalaswami the answer is obvious: contraception, for which the Indian government has already set aside a sum of 6,500,-ooo rupees ($1,365,000) in research money. “We must consider it as a fortunate circumstance,” said Gopalaswami, “that the religious faith of most of our people* is not bound up with taboos against it.” With every Indian family restricting itself to a maximum of three little Indians, the census chief reckons that his country’s population can in time be leveled off at a steady 450 million.

* Neither Hindus nor Moslems have any doctrinal scruples about practicing birth control.