India: The two-child norm, a sword hanging over women
Apr 25, 2013
The two-child norm, introduced in India for local government, or panchayat, elections in 1992, has affected the political participation of women primarily from marginalised communities, writes Swapna Majumdar.
Delhi: When Kanti Naik, 38, won elections to the ward panchayat in Banda in Angul, Odisha, in 2007, she was overjoyed. Having studied only up to Class 2, her life till then had revolved around cooking, cleaning and looking after her husband, three daughters and two sons. But after winning from the reserved seat with a huge majority, she saw this as an opportunity to do something more by reaching out to other women in her scheduled caste community.
Little did she know that her dream was short-lived. Four months after elections, a complaint was filed by her opponent demanding she be dismissed for violating the two-child norm eligibility criteria laid down for contesting panchayat positions in Odisha. When she appeared before the District Collector, who had sent her the notice, she explained that no one had raised any objections when she had filed her nomination. Therefore, she should be allowed to continue.
But Naik had to step down. “This incident depressed me. I did not know about the two-child norm and that I would be affected by it. Everything was over within eight months of my election. I didn’t even get an opportunity to do any work,” she rues.
Naik is not the only woman who has felt betrayed. The two-child norm, introduced in India for local government, or panchayat, elections in 1992, has affected the political participation of women primarily from marginalised communities. “The norm seriously affects the political participation of women from the dalit, adivasi and other backward communities. It has led to their disqualification, as most of them have more than two children. This norm has disempowered women thereby undermining the basic principal of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment,” contends Abhijit Das, convenor of the New Delhi-based National Coalition Against Two-Child Norm and Coercive Population Policies.
It was soon after the 1991 Census that the government adopted the two-child norm recommended by former Kerala Chief Minister K. Karunakaran in a bid to control India’s growing population by prohibiting persons with more than two children from holding any post in the panchayats and urban local bodies. States which follow this norm include Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar (applicable in municipalities), Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.
According to the National Family Health Survey, NFHS 3 (2005-06), most Indian states, including some high fertility states in the north, have reached replacement level fertility. In other words, a majority of couples do not wish to have more than two children. And yet, some states continue to push the two-child norm, instead of focusing on increasing access to healthcare and family planning services. This violation of women’s reproductive rights is inherent in denying those with more than two children the benefits of over 20 government schemes related to maternal and child health, either overtly or covertly.
Health activists feel the government is promoting this policy in the name of population stabilisation. Centrally sponsored schemes that deny benefits to women with more than two children include the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana, National Maternity Benefit Scheme, Ballika Samriddhi Yojna, Janashree Bima Yojna, Shiksha Sahayog Yojna and the Janani Suraksha Yojna.
State governments also promote similar programmes. Schemes such as Devi Rupak (Haryana), Mamata (Odisha), Bhagyalakshmi (Karnataka), Girl Child Protection scheme (Andhra Pradesh), Balri Rakshak Yojna (Punjab), Ladli (Delhi), Pannadhai Jeevan Amrit Yojna (Rajasthan) and Ladli Lakshmi Yojna (Madhya Pradesh) are some of the initiatives that seek to reward women with only two children. “Poor women know one out of every 15 children born to them will not survive until the first birthday due to our shocking rates of infant and newborn mortality. So they are desperate to have at least one or two that will stay alive. But they find themselves excluded from benefits because of such conditions,” says Jashodhara Dasgupta of the National Alliance for Maternal Health and Human Rights (NAMHHR), a group of 17 NGOs working on gender and health.
In Odisha, where the two-child norm has been in place since 1994, innumerable women in the reproductive age group have been impacted with the minimum age for contesting elections having been lowered from 26 to 21 years. According to a 2007 study conducted Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, a New Delhi-based NGO promoting women’s right, the implementation of the norm led to an increase in pre-natal sex determination tests resulting in the abortion of female foetuses.
Six years on, the situation hasn’t changed. According to Sukanta Mahapatra of the Hunger Project in Odisha, the enforcement of the two child norm on panchayat representatives has led to increased discrimination against the girl child and worsening the already declining child sex ratio in the state. There has been a sharp decline in the child sex ratio - from 953 girls for every 1000 boys in the 0-6 year age group in 2001 Census to 934 in the latest 2011 Census. “A rise in sex selective abortions leading to a skewed sex ratio is further perpetuated with the prevalence of this norm. While it is true that these problems were not created just by the two child norm, its existence has worsened women’s health and wellbeing,” says Mahapatra.
Ironically, while Odisha has increased reservation for women in local bodies from 33 per cent to 50, the two child norm acts as a barrier for their effective political participation. “The norm only benefits and strengthens traditional structures of patriarchy that have always restricted women’s entry into public space,” adds Mahapatra.
Sabita Sethi, who won the ward elections in Balianta block of the state’s Khurda district, had to pay a heavy price for her success. Although she was able to win over her conservative husband to be able to contest, she was forced to give her youngest daughter up for adoption after objections were raised on the number of children. She had three daughters.
According to Anuradha Mohanty of the Peoples Cultural Centre, an NGO working in Khurda, the district with one of the lowest child sex ratio in the state, “In 2001 Census, the child sex ratio was 926 girls for 1000 boys. This has now gone down to 910 girls. We think that the two-child norm has certainly played a role in its decline,” she states.
In Gujarat, a recent study on the two-child norm for elected representatives of Panchayati Raj Institutions in the state found that it had become a tool to settle personal scores and eliminate political opponents. The 2011 study, conducted by Surat-based Centre for Social Studies, reveals that the law had no structured implementation mechanism and only worked through the complaint route. Action was only initiated if someone complained about the third child. This had fuelled local power politics at the village level.
According to the Coalition for Two Child Norm, women face negative consequences of implementation of the norm directly (as candidates) as well as indirectly (as spouse of those disqualified) in the form of desertion, forced abortions, neglect and death of female infant or female child being given up for adoption.
So, is this norm necessary to speed up the process of population stabilisation? There is no evidence to show that this policy has led to decline in fertility rate. On the contrary, there is proof of how it has violated women’s reproductive, human and political rights. There is data to also show that the availability of basic public services is significantly higher in female sarpanch (panchayat head) villages compared to the male sarpanch villages when the former have been in the job for three to three-and-a-half years. Authors of the study, ‘Can the Female Sarpanch Deliver?’ conducted in Sangli, Masharashtra, concluded that reservations have had a significant positive impact on the democratic participation of women. Surely, all this is enough evidence to convince governments to do away with the discriminating two child norm.
Taken from : http://southasia.oneworld.net/features/india-the-two-child-norm-a-sword-hanging-over-women#.VMn7fmiUde-
The “too many, too little” myth
Supreme Court judgement on two-child norm
Amita Bhaduri
THE Supreme Court of India has recently (12.10.2004) upheld the decision to disqualify a member of panchayat in Haryana, for violating the two-child norm. Although the norm is not legally binding, the court still contended that it was “in the national interest to check population growth” and that it included the use of legislative disincentives. At present six states including Haryana, Rajasthan, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh have made the two-child norm mandatory for all panchayat members. Hundreds of Panchayat members have been removed from their posts in these states because they failed to comply with the two-child norm. Many women have also been forced to step down despite having a very limited say in matters of reproductive choice. Indeed, the two-child norm has been a clever way of defusing the potentially empowering impact of reservation for women in the panchayats.
In an attempt to cover up the birth of the third child panchayat members are now reportedly resorting to sending their pregnant wives away for two-three years, divorce, alleging infidelity, getting their third child adopted, producing fake birth certificates and increased sex selective abortions. Several states have gone to the extent of laying down a diktat that government jobs too would be denied to people who have more than two children. Those already in service would not be promoted for five years if they opted to have a third child. This rule is already being implemented in Rajasthan; other state governments including Maharashtra, Delhi and Gujarat are eager to introduce it.
The Supreme Court ruling is clearly not in line with the National Population Policy, 2000 and the government has gone on the defensive with the Central Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss stating that imposing two-child norm “constitutes a violation of fundamental rights”. While he ruled out the idea of incorporating any element of coercion into the National Population Policy, the government’s position remains dubious. On the other hand the BJP has demanded that the Centre strictly implement the two-child norm equally across all communities to arrest the ‘skewed’ population growth rate. The obnoxious statement by Venkiah Naidu implying a surgical solution to the ‘Muslim population’ is in step with the BJP’s communal agenda.
In recent weeks women rights groups have joined the opposition to the two-child norm. But their opposition remains mostly limited to the upholding of women’s reproductive rights in isolation from qualitative economic and political changes. In fact, several state led and international agencies are already pushing forward various methods of fertility control, under the guise of broadening women’s reproductive rights and choices without making any substantial improvements in their lives. The Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) programme in our country focuses on demographic targets rather than girl’s education. In other words, women continue to be treated as reproductive agents and not political or economic agents in their own right, subsumed under the objectives of population control policies designed to curb the fertility of the poor.
There are yet others who have gone beyond the demand for access to reproductive rights and have said that women if given proper access to education, health care and social opportunity will have fewer children. The civil rights groups on the other hand, have variously called the two-child norm as an attack on individual freedom and fundamental rights, a dehumanising programme that violates human reproductive, rights and of being ‘morally wrong’. They point that the norm is discriminatory vis-a-vis the poor, dalits, tribal groups and minorities. They insist that the population problem can be handled in more sensitive and sensible ways and that the aim should be population stabilisation and not population control.
The Supreme Court judgement is in fact reminiscent of a Malthusian ahistorical emphasis on population (stabilisation) to explain all social, economic and political problems. More than anything else, it seems like a restatement of the ‘population time-bomb’ hysteria, originally fathered by Malthus, an English clergyman of the 18th century, and fuelled more recently by environmentalist Paul Ehrlich in 1970s. Malthus had blamed social unrest and crime of the industrial revolution on the excessive breeding of the ‘underclasses’, and Ehrlich’s followers, argue that population control is the solution to global poverty, famine, a declining environment and deteriorating standards of public health. Marx’s critique of the Malthusian principle of population is based on the principle of the reserve army of labour or relative surplus population, which he elaborates in the course of his analysis of the general law of capital accumulation. An effect of capital accumulation is that the demand for labour results in the inevitable production of a reserve army of labour. According to Marx, there was need to examine population historically, as each mode of production has its own laws of population. Today’s problems have to be understood as effects of uneven global capitalist development and not as natural laws of population as the Supreme Court judgement insinuates. Or is the Supreme Court judgement the beginning of a renewed rhetoric to rationalize the extermination of the poor?
Taken from : http://www.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2004/November/commentary_supreme_Court_judgement.htm
Emergency without an Emergency? The two-child norm for panchayat members
Laws to empower dalits, adivasis, OBCs and other sections of the poor through local self-government institutions are being circumvented by anti-democratic population policies. Indeed, if today fertility is to be a marker for citizenship, can the day be far behind when religion is?
Historical memories are notoriously weak, but the Emergency, not too long ago, was a period when the trains supposedly ran on time, and the government finally showed political will in the implementation of the family planning programme. It was also a period when the right to strike was abrogated. Both these measures met with widespread middle class support. Never mind that the Emergency period also witnessed the death of 1,774 people due to what were called "family planning excesses", the highest mortality toll imposed by a "welfare" measure throughout the world. These "excesses" also cast a deep dark shadow over the family planning programme from which it is still to recover.
In recent weeks the Supreme Court of India has passed two judgements that eerily recall this period. Do we then have an Emergency declared by the judiciary? The first is the judgement on July 30. A three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court upheld a Haryana government law prohibiting a person from contesting or holding the post of sarpanch or panch in a Panchayati Raj Institution (local self-government) if he or she had more than two children. The Bench observed that "disqualification on the right to contest an election for having more than two children does not contravene any fundamental right, nor does it cross the limits of reasonability. Rather, it is a disqualification conceptually devised in the national interest". A few days later, on August 6, the Supreme Court also passed a judgement that prohibits government employees from resorting to strike.
While trade unions and some political parties have reacted sharply to the second judgement, there has been widespread approbation among the middle classes and the elites to the first. Political parties and trade unions have of course remained largely silent.
But this is not only a serious misreading of the relationship between population and resources, it is also an egregious assault on the fitful process of democratisation in our country. Indeed it is thoughtless folly that laws to empower dalits, adivasis, OBCs and other sections of the poor through PRIs are being circumvented by these imaginatively anti-democratic population policies.
When the "population bomb" predicted by neo-Malthusian doomsday Cold Warrior demographers failed to materialise, when it was understood that one reason for the failure of family planning programmes globally was the constraints on women's agency, the international population control movement - with the western feminist movement providing the leadership - initiated what has been described as a "paradigm shift". One central aspect of the paradigm shift is that family planning services are to be broadened in order to attend to women's - and indeed men's -- reproductive needs and rights and not as a function of control of a non-existent "population explosion".
There is a vast amount of empirical evidence of the profoundly anti-Malthusian relationship between population and resources. Tilly, on the basis of a historical review, concluded: "Over the long run, population growth and economic expansion generally accompany each other. Likewise economic decline and demographic contraction tend to occur together" (Tilly 1978: 24).[1] The classic by Habakkuk on population growth in 18th-century England outlines five ways in which substantial population increase stimulated economic growth (Habakkuk 1971).[2] Kuznets concluded that, other things being equal, population growth also has a positive effect on savings (Kuznets 1956).[3] Indeed, examining regional statistics on the growth of population and industry, the favourable economic effects of population density and population growth are "confirmed to an embarrassing degree" (Clark1968:279)[4]. One striking empirical truth in the history of health is that improvements in human longevity have been associated with increases in human populations. A graph of the growth of populations superimposed on that of human longevity reveals their astonishingly close association. All these lessons were lost to us in Cold War politics that brought to the fore a completely different, and alarming, understanding of the issue.
A more recent and comprehensive 1986 review sponsored by the US National Academy of Sciences issued a cautiously worded statement, to the dismay of the community of doomsday demographers, noting that population growth has both positive and negative impacts and that the actual net impact cannot be determined based on existing evidence.
Reflecting both this understanding, and the commitments made at the ICPD in 1994 in Cairo in February 2000, the Government of India adopted the National Population Policy 2000 (NPP). One undoubtedly positive feature of the NPP is that it resolutely affirms the "commitment of the government towards voluntary and informed choice and consent of citizens while availing of reproductive health care services, and continuation of the target-free approach in administering family planning services" (GOI: 2000:2)[5]. Committing itself to respect for human rights and the freedom and dignity of women, these were translated into a non-target-oriented family welfare programme, which rightly abjured incentives and disincentives.
Several state governments on the other hand, some at the behest of an American consultancy firm, Futures Group, whose function it has been to recreate fears of the population explosion, announced population policies which very significantly violate the letter and the spirit of the NPP.
Andhra Pradesh, that dream experimental state of the World Bank, lists an astonishing series of incentives and disincentives. At the community level, performance in reproductive child health (RCH) and rates of couple protection will determine the construction of school buildings, public works and funding for rural development programmes. Performance in RCH is also to be made the criterion for full coverage under programmes like TRYSEM, DWCRA, Weaker Section Housing Scheme, and Low Cost Sanitation Scheme. Allotment of surplus agricultural land, housing sites, as well as benefits under IRDP, SC Action Plan, and BC Action Plan are to be given in preference to acceptors of terminal methods of contraception. Educational concessions, subsidies and promotions as well as government jobs are to be restricted to those who accept the small family norm. Shockingly, a lottery with an award of Rs 10,000 is to be given to three couples to be selected from every district on the basis of a lucky dip. The eligible include three couples per district with two girl children adopting permanent methods of family planning, three couples per district with one child adopting permanent methods of family planning and three couples per district with two or less children adopting vasectomy.
The population policies of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh also carry many of these features. All of them debar women with more than two children from contesting elections to Panchyati Raj Institutions. The Uttar Pradesh population policy also disqualifies persons married before the legal age of marriage from government jobs, as if children are responsible for child marriages. Further, 10% of financial assistance to Panchayats is to be based on family planning performance. Indeed, fearfully recalling the Emergency, the assessment of the performance of medical officers and other health workers is linked to performance in the RCH programme.
A number of health groups and women's groups in the country have repeatedly protested these draconian features of state population policies. Their objections are based on compelling grass-roots experience that pointed out that these disincentives and incentives are anti-women,
anti-adivasi, anti-dalit, anti-child and anti-poor in general. They are also
profoundly violative of human and democratic rights and commitments made by the Government of India in several international covenants.
anti-adivasi, anti-dalit, anti-child and anti-poor in general. They are also
profoundly violative of human and democratic rights and commitments made by the Government of India in several international covenants.
The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for 1998-99 shows that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is 3.15 for Scheduled Castes, 3.06 for Scheduled Tribes, 2.66 among Other Backward Castes and 3.47 among illiterate women as a whole. It is, in contrast, 1.99 among better-off women and thus likely to be educated beyond the tenth grade. Imposition of the two-child norm, and the disincentives proposed, would mean that the majority of these already deprived populations would bear the brunt of the state's withdrawal of ameliorative measures, pitiably inadequate as they are. With the recent Supreme Court judgement the majority of these populations will be debarred from their right to contest elections in one fell stroke. This is in fact another guise of the old property requirement for franchise in the years before universal suffrage.
In the states where these laws have been imposed, as in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, scores of cases have been documented where women have been deserted, or forced to undergo sex-selective abortions. Children have also been abandoned or given up for adoption. In general, such a norm provides an impetus for an increase in sex-selective abortions, worsening an already terrible child sex ratio in the country.
As the NPP itself acknowledges, there is a large need for health and safe contraceptive services. To propose punitive measures in this context is clearly absurd. Reflecting deprivation, the dalits, adivasis and Other Backward Castes bear a significantly higher proportion of the mortality load in the country.
The NFHS for 1998-99 notes that the Infant Mortality Rate(IMR) among the SCs, STs and Other Backward Castes is 83, 84 and 76 respectively, compared to 62 for Others. Similarly the under-5 mortality rate is 119 among the SCs, 126 among the STs, 103 among the OBCs, compared to 82 among the Others. Clearly, to impose a two-child norm under such circumstances is to widen inequalities among our people. Would the Supreme Court consider, equally, a norm for child survival?
Health and women's groups approached the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) last year with a memorandum that the two-child norm was discriminatory, anti-democratic and violative of commitments made by the Government of India in several international covenants. The NHRC, obviously convinced of some aspects of this case, in response issued orders to the concerned state governments. At a National Colloquium on January 9 and 10, 2003, attended by representatives of these state governments, a Declaration was issued.
This NHRC Declaration "notes with concern that population policies framed by some State Governments reflect in certain respects a coercive approach through use of incentives and disincentives, which in some cases are violative of human rights. This is not consistent with the spirit of the National Population Policy. The violation of human rights affects, in particular the marginalised and vulnerable sections of society, including women".
Of special interest to the learned judges of the Supreme Court should be that the Declaration also noted: "further that the propagation of a two-child norm and coercion or manipulation of individual fertility decisions through the use of incentives and disincentives violate the principle of voluntary informed choice and the human rights of the people, particularly the rights of the child".
We thus have the piquant situation where judges of the Supreme Court are apparently unaware of these serious concerns of the NHRC. It needs to be recalled that there is a significant demographic transition occurring in the country; to hasten this requires investments in health, education, food and employment - all areas being compromised by neo-liberal policies. What is clearly not required are counter-productive punitive measures. It also perhaps needs to be recalled that given the age structure of the population, there is an in-built momentum which coercive measures can do nothing about.
There also needs to be discussion about the function of justice. Perhaps it is now naïve to believe that this is to uphold truth; and that it is also to enhance freedoms and opportunities and not curtail them in the interests of ill-defined national objectives. But if today fertility is to be a marker for citizenship, can the day be far behind when religion is?
(Mohan Rao teaches at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
- Tilly, Charles (1978), "Introduction" in Charles Tilly (Ed), Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, Princeton University Press New Jersey.
- Habakkuk, John (1971), Population Growth and Economic Development since 1750, Leicester University Press, Leicester.
- Kuznets, Simon (1956), Economic Development and Cultural Change, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
- Clark, Colin (1968), Population Growth and Land Use, Macmillan, London.
- Government of India (2000) Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, National Population Policy 2000, New Delhi.
InfoChange News & Features, August 2003
Taken from : http://infochangeindia.org/governance/features/emergency-without-an-emergency-the-two-child-norm-for-panchayat-members.html
Two-child norm puts panchayats under pressure
The mandatory two-child norm for panchayat members, that exists in many Indian states, is proving to be more divisive than productive, with many women being forced to step down from their posts despite having little say in the number of children they have
In Rajasthan, a woman sarpanch was forced to smuggle her one-month-old baby to her mother's house, located 120 km away from her home. The child is being brought up by its grandmother. "If I had not done so, the villagers around me would have complained to the local collector and I would have been disqualified from my post," says Sitara Devi who lives near Kotah.
In Madhya Pradesh, an equally frightened Ahmed Hasan, who lives 80 km away from Bhopal, sent his newborn son to live with his elder brother for fear that the local sarpanch would complain about him because he had had his third child.
Hasan points out that before his election to the post he had done a great deal of work in the village. "I could not let all that go waste simply because I had failed to comply with the mandatory two-child norm."
Presently, six states including Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh have made the two-child norm mandatory for all panchayat members. The governments of all these states insist that those with more than two living children are debarred from contesting panchayat elections or remaining in office. With the minimum age for contesting elections having been lowered from 26 to 21 years, this immediately affects lakhs of younger men and women within the reproductive age-group.
The passing of the 73rd constitutional amendment made it mandatory for 33% of all panchayat seats to be reserved for women. It also mandated quotas for socially marginalised sections including dalits and those belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (SC/STs).
But it's the two-child policy that has had the greatest impact on women and marginalised sections of society. Nirmala Buch, who runs a Bhopal-based NGO, Mahila Chetna Manch (MCM), points out that already 412 panchayat members in Rajasthan have been removed from their posts, over the past three years, because they failed to comply with the two-child norm.
Buch says: "In Madhya Pradesh, 350 panchayat members have been removed and in Haryana the number of those removed is 275. In Madhya Pradesh, all those who were removed from their posts were tribals. They are not with the laws of the land, and instead of encouraging them to join this process they are being forced to turn away."
Buch is in the process of tabulating the figures of those removed in Orissa, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. The MCM was asked to conduct a study on the impact of the two-child policy by UNIFEM. Buch claims her organisation has interviewed several thousand panchayat members in order to compile the report. Most of the people who have been removed, she says, are either Muslims or belong to SC/STs and other backward castes (OBCs).
Women are undoubtedly the worst affected. The majority have no say over exercising their reproductive choices. And, with preference for a male son continuing to be the norm especially at the village level, families have no objection to women stepping down from their posts in order to give birth to at least two or three sons.
Twenty-six-year-old Kalavati, from a village outside Bundi in Rajasthan, points out: "Being an OBC, I was elected on a reserved seat. During the first term I was too scared to open my mouth and remained a rubber stamp member. It was only during my second term that I began to speak out. The birth of my third child forced me to step down. The government only talks of helping us. If they had wanted to they could have allowed me to continue since I was working to improve the lot of others in my village."
Panchayat members consider their position as stepping-stones in their political careers. They also see it as a major boost to their career prospects. As a result they are willing to go to any lengths to cover up the birth of a third child. From opting to send their pregnant wives away for two to three years, to divorce, to alleging infidelity, to getting their third child adopted, to producing fake birth certificates.
Buch says: "As it is, village politics is getting so divisive. This encourages people to spy on each other and accelerate caste divisions."
Certain states have gone to the extent of laying down a diktat that government jobs too would be denied to people who have more than two children. Those already in service would not be promoted for five years if they opted to have a third child. This rule is already being implemented in Rajasthan; other state governments including Maharashtra, Delhi and Gujarat are keen to introduce it. If they have not already done so it is only because several NGOs oppose the move.
The rule has been criticised by both the National Population Policy and the ministry of health. They point out that the entire thrust of the new panchayat policy is to get more and more young people to join politics. Ministry officials point out that with contraception and safe family practices not always being available at the village level, a cast-iron rule like this is bound to backfire.
The state governments are only too aware of the high infant mortality rates that persist at the village level. This fact seems to have been completely bypassed when the rule was being introduced.
Prasanna Hota, secretary at the ministry of family welfare, says: "We have been trying to convince state governments not to favour incentives or disincentives for restricting family size. But this does not work at the ground level."
Mani Shankar Aiyar, panchayati raj minister, is obviously unhappy with the implementation of the two-child norm. He says: "Unfortunately, this is a state subject and should be challenged at the state level. Or else, some NGO or individual needs to file a PIL in the Supreme Court so that this whole issue can be looked at impartially."
(Rashme Sehgal is an independent writer and journalist based in New Delhi)
InfoChange News & Features, August 2004
Taken from : http://infochangeindia.org/population/analysis/two-child-norm-puts-panchayats-under-pressure.html
