Clarify how the family planning programmes have taken a political ‘U’-turn in present India. (2026, 10 Marks)
India’s family planning programme began in 1952 as a mission to suppress births. By 2024–26 elected leaders in several states were publicly urging citizens to have more. That reversal is the U-turn — but its sociological meaning lies less in the change of direction than in the change of the object of policy.
From control to correction
- The clinic approach of 1952 hardened into camps and targets, and then into the Emergency (1975–77): about 8.3 million sterilisations in 1976–77, overwhelmingly on poor, Dalit and Muslim men. The 1977 election punished it, the programme was renamed Family Welfare, and fertility became politically untouchable for a generation.
- After the Cairo conference of 1994 came the Target-Free Approach (1996), the Reproductive and Child Health programme and the National Population Policy 2000, which rejected coercion and made reproductive health the instrument of stabilisation.
The reversal now under way
- Andhra Pradesh, 19 November 2024: the state repealed the two-child disqualification for local-body candidates that had stood since 1994. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu argued that after the successful implementation of family planning it was time to incentivise families to have more children. Andhra’s TFR is 1.7.
- Telangana passed a comparable bill ending its two-child norm.
- Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister M. K. Stalin linked childbearing to the coming delimitation: the states that cut fertility fastest stand to lose Lok Sabha seats and fiscal share to those that did not.
- Mohan Bhagwat (December 2024) urged three children per family, reading sub-replacement fertility as civilisational decline.
- On 15 August 2025 the Prime Minister announced a High-Powered Demography Mission framed around illegal immigration and “unnatural demographic change”; the committee, under Justice Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar, was constituted in May 2026.
What the U-turn actually shifts
The object of population policy has moved from the body of the poor woman — sterilisation quotas, camps, acceptor targets — to the composition and location of the population: federal seat share, regional balance, religious and border demography. Fertility has not been depoliticised; it has been re-politicised along a new axis, from class and gender to region and community. The state no longer asks women to bear fewer children; it asks which populations should grow, and where.
Conclusion
The turn is partial and regionally split. Rajasthan, Assam, Gujarat, Odisha and Maharashtra retain two-child norms for public office or employment, and Uttar Pradesh floated a population control bill in 2021 — so India is pro-natalist in the south while remaining restrictive in parts of the north. That contradiction, rather than the new slogan of larger families, is the real content of the U-turn.