India was the first nation to adopt family planning as official policy—it did so all the way back in 1952. Yet, the funds made available until the mid-1960s weren’t sufficient enough to bring about effective action. Most Indian women in 1965-66 accepted IUDs. After the news about the adverse responses to IUDs spread, its acceptance fell. In 1971, the first vasectomy camp was tried out in Kerala which was a massive success. This spurred the government to carry out similar camps at a larger scale. The vasectomy camp drive was conducted through a mobile-service approach, and incentives were given to those who got sterilised.
The drive to sterilise then gained momentum. The World Bank, the Swedish International Development Authority, The Ford Foundation, and the UN Population Fund had funds available for population control as per The Global Family Planning Revolution: Three Decades of Population Policies and Programs, and India then took on the case of family planning and population control more strictly. The number of male sterilisations increased—in 1970-71, there were 1.3 million, and in 1970-71 the numbers reached 3.1 million. However, in the following year, they fell to 900,000 because of reports of medical problems, due to which the government retreated for a while.
Then, fearing political unrest due to economic and social stagnation, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched the Emergency, where all civil liberties were curbed. Her 20-Point Programme on developing the country didn’t mention family planning, yet Sanjay Gandhi’s own Four-Point Programme had this as the one and only priority, and through only one method—sterilisation.
The incentivisation for these sterilisations reached new heights—middlemen like police officials, district authorities, and tax officials along with the doctors themselves feared losing their jobs or facing salary cuts if the target number of people weren’t sterilised. The family planning programme gained momentum in 1976-77. The number of sterilisations shot up to 81 lakh in just one year. In this year, there was also the decline in IUD cases, along with a drop in using conventional contraceptives (condoms)—from 83.5 percent the previous year to 74.9 percent. This shows how the forced sterilisation programme took over the entire family planning programme, thereby essentially failing as an all-rounded approach during the Emergency.
Article Courtesy: Feminism In India
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