After 35 years of family planning, China has fully liberalized its two-child policy. The fall of the "one-child system" has once again focused attention on family planning as a basic state policy. Interestingly, India, the only country in the world with a population of 1 billion besides China, has also launched a nationwide family planning policy to curb its rapid population growth.
Back in history, India was actually the first among developing countries to introduce large-scale family planning. Faced with a growing population and an increasingly heavy burden on food and resources, the Indian government kicked into high gear as early as the 1950s to publicize the importance of having fewer children and distributing a variety of contraceptives. The early family planning policy was relatively mild and based on persuasion, and did not impose a coercive policy. However, with the rapid growth of population, the contradiction between man and land became more and more acute, and the carrying capacity of arable land became more and more problematic in the absence of technological innovation. In this regard, the Ford Foundation, in a 1959 report, pointed out that India's population would hit the upper limit of the land's carrying capacity in the 1960s, and that a food crisis and famine could ensue.
Just as Malthus in the late 18th century failed to anticipate the emergence of new technologies that would alleviate the conflict between "geometrically increasing population" and "arithmetically increasing food," Ford's report underestimated the impact of the "green revolution" on India's population. The Ford report also underestimates the impact of the "green revolution" on India's land-carrying capacity. Beginning in 1967, India introduced high-yielding hybrid rice from the Philippines and high-yielding hybrid corn and wheat from Mexico. According to the Indian scholar Bhagavan (Bhagavan) study, in conjunction with the use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and agricultural machinery under ideal conditions, these new hybrid crops can reach 3 to 4 times the acreage of the original crop, but due to the lack of agricultural materials, agricultural machinery, agricultural technology, the actual scale of the increase in yields is often only about 2 times. Although there is a gap with the ideal, but 2 times the size of the yield increase is still very substantial. For policymakers in India, this means a massive increase in economic output without any significant increase in labor or land, which is like pie in the sky.
Born out of centuries of British colonial rule, India's elite have been unusually obsessive about the country's industrialization and modernization, as well as its status as a great power, and the great leap in productivity brought about by the "green revolution" has been viewed by policymakers as a strategic opportunity for the country to move toward industrialization and modernization. All other things being equal, the new agricultural output could raise the broad savings rate as a whole, and this accumulation of capital is a key driver of industrialization and modernization for the country as a whole.
The demographic dividend of India's burgeoning population does not seem to be showing up
However, the Indian government soon discovered that the productivity gains from new technologies were quickly offset by the growing population. The reason was simple: the additional output from agriculture was being used to feed a larger population, and because of the size, fertility, and hydrothermal constraints of the land, the output of labor inputs into the land was diminishing at the margin, and a single labor input could not even be exchanged for a reciprocal amount of agricultural output. In the end, although the absolute value of land output increases, due to the synchronized (or faster) increase in population, most of the additional output is used for consumption rather than investment, and in the end, most people remain in a critical state between subsistence and famine. This is very much what Huang Zongzhi calls "involutional development". That's why India's policymakers decided that rapid population growth was the biggest obstacle to economic growth.
This thinking explains why the Indian government did not introduce a strict family planning policy in the 1960s, when the food and resource conflicts were so acute, but instead pursued a highly coercive sterilization policy in the 1970s, when the food supply situation was much reduced. Apart from the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1974-1978), which made family planning a compulsory subject in schools, the most famous compulsory sterilization measure was the mass sterilization, mainly vasectomies for men, declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975 as a state of emergency. It is estimated that more than 8 million people were subjected to this forced sterilization under Indira Gandhi. Although India officially claims that most of these people were men with two children (and more), according to some scholars, many of the people who underwent this procedure were in fact poor, destitute, and desperate vagabonds, as local officials, in an effort to meet sterilization quotas, often offered generous prizes to those who "voluntarily" sterilized themselves. -- sometimes a semiconductor radio.
Far from the desired goal of controlling consumption and promoting investment, this male-specific castration caused a severe public backlash, and the mass forced castration was a major factor in the 1977 election defeat of Indira Gandhi's government. The BJP (not the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)) succeeded in using the issue of forced sterilization to bring down Indira, and since then male sterilization has become a political no-go area for any political party. Apart from the "political incorrectness" factor, no political party is willing to endorse the suicidal policy of family planning because of the practical benefits of population control, which means weakening the vote bank of their own community, caste or nation in elections.
It is interesting to note that while family planning has become a de facto political no-go area at the intense political level, at the operational level it has never been stopped, except that the "Family Planning India", which is in charge of family planning, has changed its guise into "The controversial male vasectomy has been replaced by female tubal ligation. In the face of the world's fastest population growth rate and sharpest resource conflicts, no responsible Indian bureaucrat (not politician) would dare to let up on family planning efforts, and a huge amount of money and policy resources continue to flow from the federal government to local governments every year to implement family planning.
The government extended family planning to rural areas by establishing primary health centers and subcenters. By 1991, there were 150,000 public **** health facilities all over India providing family planning services, mainly tubal ligation for women. In addition to this, the Government of India had launched various national schemes for family planning: the All India Hospital Post-Natal Scheme for post-natal women, the Primary Health Care Facility Re-organization Scheme for women in urban slums, special inpatient projects to reserve beds for women undergoing tubal ligations, an innovative project to promote the Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs) in the rural areas, and so on. However, due to the overall low level of health and implementation capacity, these programs have hardly achieved the desired goals and have instead been targeted due to various scandals. For example, in 2014, a 'sterilisation camp' in Chhattisgarh, a converted abandoned hospital, was the scene of a horrific mass incident in which 14 women died after undergoing sterilisation surgeries, followed by fake medicines, A number of scandals have surfaced, including fake medicines, unclean equipment and a lack of pre-diagnosis.
Due to the factors of implementation and political struggle, although India's official government tries its best to promote family planning policies, but it is always difficult to achieve better results, so it can be said that India's government is not lack of willingness but lack of ability. 2014 India's population has reached 1,267 million and maintains an average annual growth rate of 1.2%. India's demographic structure is very young, in 2014 India's population aged 0-14 years accounted for 28.5%, while the population aged 65 years or older accounted for 5.8%, the current average age is 26 years (note not the average life expectancy). The combination of a large population base and faster growth rate coupled with a relatively young demographic gives India a nominal potential demographic dividend - a large number of young people with the potential to be productive in the economy as a labor force. However, it is important to note that if the potential is not realized, it will always be "potential", and in the face of extremely limited job opportunities and social resources, a large number of young people may cause social unrest and deterioration of law and order, which is precisely what many so-called "demographic dividend" countries are most concerned about. This is precisely what many so-called "demographic dividend" countries are most worried about. In this regard, a U.S. political risk assessment company even designed a model, the proportion of young people in the total population combined with the youth unemployment rate to generate an index, as a measure of a country's political risk.
Many people are happy to cite India as a positive example of a country accumulating a "demographic dividend" at a time when China is faced with the challenges of a slowing, aging population and a skewed sex ratio, but the comparison is problematic when you look at it. India's efforts to obtain a demographic dividend through "family planning" and then obtain capital for industrialization and modernization ended in failure, and a large number of India's labor force is still concentrated in the low-productivity agricultural sector, while the service sector is also relatively prosperous due to the lagging development of the industrial sector, and thus India is still in the pre-industrial period as a whole. In this socio-economic pattern, the common man has no choice but to increase the size of his population in order to expand production when other factors of production have no other choice, hence the tendency to have more children. However, if the society enters the industrialization stage, people will find that instead of increasing the quantity, it is better to promote economic output by improving the quality of the population, and they will also find that the opportunity cost of having children in an industrial society is much higher than that of a pre-industrial society, and therefore begin to prefer to increase the investment in human capital instead of increasing the number of people.
This socio-economic transition is thus the decisive factor in determining the pattern of population growth. India's current "demographic dividend" stems not so much from its incomplete family planning enterprise as from the failure of its industrialization and modernization efforts. If Indira Gandhi had succeeded in implementing family planning and in achieving basic industrialization by tightening her belt through increased agricultural accumulation from the "Green Revolution", would India need the current demographic dividend now?
Through India's example, we can see that the policy of "family planning" is in fact in a subtle paradox: successful family planning is conducive to industrialization, and the success of industrialization in turn claims the redundancy of "family planning"; failed family planning prevents a country from becoming an autonomous industrial power. Failed family planning prevents a country from industrializing on its own, while exploding populations and failed industrialization justify the need for family planning. It could even be argued that successful family planning is in the end considered "superfluous" while failed family planning is considered "necessary," which is perhaps why family planning is so controversial. This paradox is a bit like what happened to Marxism, as Eagleton explains, when Marx predicted the economic crisis and destruction of capitalism, and this sense of crisis prompted the capitalist countries to improve, thus prolonging their lives and avoiding destruction. The capitalist countries that won the Cold War were complacent and in turn mocked Marx as superfluous. Posterity tends to look outside the historical context and thus draws distorted conclusions.
But it is conceivable that if China's industrial path had been thwarted and the economic structure of its pre-industrialized society had grown old, its "demographic dividend potential" would be no less than that of India's.
What is more important is that China's demographic dividend potential is not as great as that of India.
Please accept