India’s Population: Aspects of Quality and Control

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There is enough justification for the assumption that while the family planning programme must be quick ended in pace, other nationwide synergistic social and economic programmes must be intensified simultaneously to obtain greater mileage out of the programmes of population control. Without such concurrent, supportive measures the success of population control as a one-shot measure, operated however vigorously over a short span of time is very likely severely to backfire, as indeed it did in the beginning of 1977. Measures to improve the quality of population to the point where the support for tight control measures could be easily generated, are inexpensive and possible at the present level of India’s economic development, provided the ground is cleared for greater public involvement in the welfare and economic programmes through greater vertical decentralization and horizontal spread. The country would never scrape up the financial and other resources to achieve all these targets within the foreseeable future if the programmes continued to be based on standard governmental norms of expenditure, outfit and per capita performance, but could possibly overfulfil the targets if the right type of motivational and organizational effort is mounted to build up on the social deployment of surpluses of human energy and enterprise for community needs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ashok Mitra

Ashok Mitra has had a fabulous academic career, including a brilliant Ph.D. under Jan Tinbergen, and he has held important offices in the economic administration of India; he was Chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. He has taught in some of the premier institutions in India; and academic work took him to many places of higher learning all over the world. But throughout these years, his deep commitment to the cause of the people had found constant expression in overt and covert political action and in a stream of stimulating writing, both learned and popular, in English as well as Bangla. The long stint as Minister of Finance in the Left Front Government of West Bengal from 1977 onwards was, in fact, a culmination and a beginning for a man of enormous intellectual and political energy. He was also a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) for a time. His involvement in Leftist politics is still as active as ever and his writing has continued, as this book demonstrates. Dr. Mitra and his wife Gauri live in Kolkata.