Comment on the influence of social and cultural factors on family planning in India. (1990, 2009)
The premise of India’s family planning programme was that fertility is an individual decision, to be changed by informing a couple and supplying a method. Sociology has shown that premise to be wrong. Fertility is a household decision, taken within a structure of caste, kinship and property, and this is why the programme long underperformed its own targets even as its logistics improved.
The household, not the couple, is the decision-making unit
Tulsi Patel‘s Fertility Behaviour: Population and Society in a Rajasthan Village (1994) is the decisive Indian study. She found fertility decisions taken not by the conjugal pair but by the household, in which the mother-in-law’s authority over her son’s wife outweighed the husband’s; a young bride’s reproduction was supervised, not chosen. A programme addressing “eligible couples” was speaking to people who did not hold the decision.
The economic rationality of large families
Mahmood Mamdani‘s The Myth of Population Control (1972), a restudy of the villages of the Khanna experiment in Punjab, showed that cultivators rejected contraception because children were assets — farm labour, insurance against mortality, and the only old-age security available. His thesis inverts the programme’s logic: large families are a consequence of poverty rather than its cause, so fertility falls when the conditions that make children valuable change, not when a message is delivered.
Son preference and the ritual necessity of a son
A son lights the pyre, performs the shraddha, continues the lineage and retains the land; a daughter entails dowry and leaves. Couples therefore practise sex-selective stopping — continuing until a son arrives — which keeps fertility above the desired family size. The same preference, married to ultrasound, produced sex-selective abortion and the PCPNDT Act 1994.
Education, religion and community
- Women’s schooling remains the strongest single correlate of lower fertility, through age at marriage, autonomy and access.
- The fertility gap between communities is real but shrinking and is explained by education, income and access rather than doctrine: NFHS-5 records a TFR of 2.36 for Muslims and 1.94 for Hindus, with Muslim fertility having fallen furthest, from about 4.4 in 1992-93. The communal reading of fertility survives in politics, not in the data.
- Caste and class structure contraceptive access; Bina Agarwal‘s argument that women’s security rests on independent assets bears directly on why old-age insurance is still sought in sons.
The programme’s own cultural legacy
The coercive sterilisation drive of 1975-77 — sterilisations rose from about 1.3 million in 1975 to roughly 8 million in 1976-77, then collapsed to a tenth of that — discredited family planning for a generation and left the programme female-only and sterilisation-heavy. NFHS-5 shows 37.9 per cent of women aged 15-49 sterilised against 0.3 per cent reporting a sterilised husband, and only 58.7 per cent of sterilised women told of side effects. Contraception remains culturally coded as a woman’s burden.
Conclusion
The balance sheet is paradoxical: TFR has fallen to 2.0, below replacement, and unmet need to 8.5 per cent (NFHS-6, 2023-24), achieved largely by the social change the sociologists pointed to — schooling, urban employment, falling child mortality — rather than by the programme’s methods. The political frame has now reversed, from population control to reproductive rights and, increasingly, to ageing and below-replacement fertility. The lesson stands: development proved the better contraceptive because fertility was never an individual choice to begin with.