Do successful population control and family planning translate into the overall well being of a village? While government policy would have one believe so, the experience of one village in Madhya Pradesh tells a different story.
Dhanora village in Betul's Athaner block, better known as “Congress Dhanora”, adopted family planning way back in 1922, and how!
The village has added only 560 people to its population of 1,117 in 1947. Its population according to the 2001 census was 1,642.
Presently, the population of Dhanora is only 1,677.
The village has come to be known as “Congress Dhanora” following Kasturba Gandhi's visit in 1922 for a regional Congress convention as well as for its cadre of committed Indian National Congress activists during the Indian independence movement.
According to village elders, it was “Ba”, who gave the village the mantra of “small family, happy family”.
Since then, the village has faithfully followed Kasturba's advice, by adopting family planning measures like vasectomy, almost as a habit.
While the village could well be the best model for population control and family planning in the country, the people of Congress Dhanora are hardly excited about their “success”.
“Most families here are small, with three to four, sometimes five members, but that has not helped our cause. Several families opted for family planning after one or even two daughters and no son,,” says Durga Das, the village sarpanch.
The fact assumes significance in the context of rural Madhya Pradesh's preference for the male child and the state's dismal child sex ratio.
“But all that has not helped our cause one bit. Our children have to travel 8 km to Athaner for studies as our village does not have a higher secondary school. We have a 20-bed hospital but its run by a compounder as there are no doctors posted here,” says the sarpanch.
Dhanora loses out to every government scheme that has a population criterion of 2,000 and above, for instance, schemes related to higher school education and banking services.
“Recently, when we went there for a nasbandi drive, people told us they had already adopted nasbandi and that had deprived them of several government schemes,” says S.T. Temne, CEO, Athaner block panchayat.
Compared to Dhanora's self-adopted family planning initiative, expensive and target-driven government family planning schemes, often implemented through force or incentives like gun-licenses, have only yielded patchy results for Madhya Pradesh.
The State’s decadal growth, at 20.3 % during 2001 to 2011, is higher than the national average of 17.6% and the highest among larger states (population of 50 million and more) like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, lower only than Rajasthan and Bihar.
In recent times, the Madhya Pradesh government has been under fire from the media for allegedly adopting forced population control measures.
Over the last few weeks, CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan has had to clarify, more than once, before the press as well as in the State assembly that the government had directed target-crazy officials to refrain from “enforcing” family planning.
