An independent, neutral & impartial opinion of the child will come to the fore. Courts with their wisdom can then separate the chaff from the grain for the true welfare of the child. Honouring a child’s view, under immediate interim Court Orders, both parents can share parental duties and responsibilities, dissolving their mutual acrimony & bitterness in the best interest of a child. Justice A. Mustaque Judge Kerala High Court, author of multiple Judgements on welfare of children in need of care and protection, has innovated and introduced a brilliant and ingenious machinery of child support lawyers within the existing infrastructure of our one child policy in india existing legal systems.
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But the policy has brought its own set of challenges to one of the world’s biggest economies, which has had a declining youth population for years while the proportion of the population over age 65 has risen from about 4% to almost 10%. According to the ministry of health and family welfare, India’s rate of total population growth has declined from 21.5% during the 1991 to 2001 period, to 17.6% during the 2001 to 2011 period. However, financial inducements for doctors and the women means poorer women are pressured to undergo these procedures. India’s commitment to eliminating child labour, as underscored by its ratification of ILO Conventions 138 and 182 and its alignment with SDG 8.7, reflects a broader vision of safeguarding children’s rights and dignity. These rules widely provide for the prevention, rescue and rehabilitation of child and adolescent labour.
“There is no evidence to show that proposing incentives or disincentives for adherence to the two-child norm will be effective,” Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, told Al Jazeera. It also suggests incentives such as tax rebates for people with two or less children in the state, home to more than 200 million people. As early as March 2022, reports circulated on Chinese social media that India’s population had already surpassed China’s, though this was later dispelled by experts. India will surpass China as the country with the world’s largest population in 2023, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 report. India spent more than $100 million on family planning in 2015 to 16, with some of these programs resulting in improvement.
Why two-child plan in India’s most populous state is ‘coercive’
The rate seems very low, but the data was stretched by the low rate in South India. The fact is that in North India, the fertility rate is way over 5 births per woman, which is as high as the mean the African countries with the highest fertility (Roser). If the policy is implemented, it can readily control the fertility rates and suppress the aggravated problem of overpopulation. Population control can help reduce carbon emission in India and help alleviate climate change. Carbon emission means the carbon dioxide emission due to certain human activities. India is among the top 5 countries with the highest carbon emission in the world.
India’s Microfinance challenge
While laws like the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act and its 2016 amendment have set critical benchmarks, the lack of updated data, limited awareness, and weak implementation continue to undermine their effectiveness. Despite the country’s economic and social progress, the implementation of the national programme highlights that eradicating child labour and addressing broader child rights issues remains a persistent challenge. Supreme Court & High Courts perform a salutary function in exercising their vibrant child protection parens patriae jurisdiction to do justice to children in fit cases, dehors technicalities of law. Sadly, the outmoded & antiquated Guardian & Wards Act, 1890, prescribing singular guardianship & custody rights, is an anti-thesis to the rights of the child to a unified Family Life.
In the southern state of Karnataka, BJP leader CT Ravi on Tuesday called for a population control policy on the lines of Assam and Uttar Pradesh. “No law will be able to bring down the fertility rate and laws which already exist in 12 Indian states have not shown any positive change towards people’s reproductive behaviour. So this law is also not going to achieve that,” Chandra told Al Jazeera. According to the United Nations Population Division, a TFR of about 2.1 children per woman is called replacement-level fertility, which, if sustained over a longer period, each generation will exactly replace itself.
- Expeditious return of abducted children from India to their foreign homes finds no mechanical application as India does not follow a mirror order jurisprudence as a Non-Hague signatory country.
- Legislation in Uttar Pradesh proposes to make people with more than two children ineligible for government jobs and exclude them from state’s schemes.
- Some Indian states and municipalities have already legislated that people with more than two children are ineligible for government jobs and to stand for political office.
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- In December last year, India’s health ministry, in an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, said coercing people to have a certain number of children would be “counterproductive” and lead to a “demographic distortion”.
Moreover, sex-selective abortion, preference for male children, denying the paternity of female children, pre-natal sex determination, and violence against women for giving birth to girl children will be on rise. Female literacy, empowerment, and addressing unmet needs of contraceptives are the time-tested solutions for population control rather than raising a new social problem with a “two-child policy” bill/act. Globally, countries have shown that the “two-child norm” act may not always produce the desire outcome; on the contrary, unintended outcomes were far more serious. India’s population has more than doubled since its family-planning policy wentinto effect in the 1950s, and current projections predict that India willovertake China’s position as most populous nation by 2050. However, India’stotal fertility rate has declined by more than 40 percent since the 1960s, andtoday the average number of children per woman is around three.
The ideology of CLAP & CLS is worth replicating over all jurisdictions under different High Courts in India. It needs no statutory amendments of existing Family Laws, no major overhaul of the existing legal machinery & is simple to implement, effectuate and put in immediate motion. National & State Judicial Academies can facilitate implementation of this innovative programme for knowledge sharing & immediate use. May we remember that a fair hearing for the child is not only an obligation but also an honour, for in their fledgling words lie the seeds of tomorrow’s society.
- Four Indian states with large Muslim populations have already passed versions of a “two-child policy”.
- But despite a lower fertility rate, the country’s population is still growing.
- Ironically, if the provisions of the proposed two-child policy law were to be applied in Uttar Pradesh, half of the legislators belonging to the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would not be eligible to contest the assembly elections.
- But the notion that India should emulate China’s past population policies is misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.
- However, they collect and publish data on workers (main and marginal) and non-workers.
But despite a lower fertility rate, the country’s population is still growing. Even I can identify children under 14 years of age engaged in employment in Bangalore. They are predominantly involved in selling flowers and small items, working in hotels, mechanic shops, and so on, but state agencies are unable to identify child labour in Bangalore. The major challenge is that legislators enact laws, but state actors fail to implement them effectively. A study published in The Lancet in July 2020 found that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten the decline in fertility and slow population growth. Muttreja of the Population Foundation of India pointed out the “complete contrast” between the proposed law and the government’s population policy based on a “non-coercive, life-cycle approach”.
But the notion that India should emulate China’s past population policies is misguided at best, and dangerous at worst. The government should prioritize integrating ‘Child Budgeting’ into all budgets and programs across the Central and State Governments and their undertakings. Additionally, it must ensure that the allocated funds for children are utilized effectively while progressively increasing the budget to address their evolving needs. Over the past decades, recognizing the partnership and support of UNICEF in India, the Government of India released four commemorative postage stamps on the 25th and 40th anniversary of UNICEF in India and to commemorate 30 years of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, in 2019. Children are not chattels; they are persons endowed with rights, deserving to be heard and cherished.
