Needed: Population planning not control

July 4, 2009

Ameer Hamza — The population pressure on Bangladesh, one of the world’s most fertile but land scarce countries, needs no telling. From 35 per cent in the 1960s, rural landlessness had risen well over 50 per cent by the end of the 20th century. In this first decade of the new millennium things have gotten worse, not better, for the people at the bottom whose livelihoods are pre-dominantly land and water-based, with virtually no back-up support in terms of socio-economic security. The effects of increasing landlessness and high fertility on the rural poor are self-evident. Dispossessed, pauperized and marginalized, they end up as seasonal or permanent migrants in the heartless cities, existing on the edge as formal and informal labour.

Countless dialogues, workshops, reports and what-have-you, have for decades been telling governments with high birth rates to focus on enhancing the lives of the people, through universal education, primary and mother- and -child health care, productive employment and other basic but vital inputs, so that they can get out of the vicious cycle of poverty- illiteracy- poor health- low productivity- lack of opportunities and other deprivations which encourage the poor to bank on babies for ‘social security.’

The task is of course tremendous and certainly cannot be covered in short-term political schemes. Most governments here are inclined to undertake only five-year or ten year plans at most, whereas, vital sectors like ‘human resource planning and development’ —– which is what ‘population planning should be in the first place —– require no less than a hundred year national vision, symbolically speaking, to yield tangible inter-generational dividends. As governments come and go, consistency and continuity are also found missing in such sectors.

Then there is the ‘population control’ lobby which is invariably blaming the poor for their misfortune instead of looking at the root cause, which is, as mentioned before, inadequate investment in the growing army of disadvantaged people and their need for basic civic amenities like water, shelter and sanitation, access to health care, education and secure employment. Forcing birth control programs on people without first addressing the root causes of inequity and injustice amounts to putting the cart before the horse. Barring the ‘controllers’ with their severe shortsightedness, anyone with the right mind can see that runaway population and ecological deterioration are not the result of poverty but the cause of skewed development priorities of successive governments in Bangladesh.

Human beings are not just numbers, no matter how ‘dispensible’ the poor and powerless may appear to fat cats here and in the rich countries. People-centred development philosophers rightly blame governments for not investing seriously and sustainably enough in the development of our human resource, above which there can be no better contraceptive. The South-east Asian countries were no better than us three to four decades ago. The reason why their populations have performed spectacularly in terms of education, productivity and other pluses is that their development agenda had people’s weal at the centre of all their initiatives. They invested in education, skill development and employment and did not need to ‘doctor’ statistics. The bottom line therefore, is an honest- to-God political will of the government—- no matter which party comes to power —- and a consistent and corruption-free attitude to national development, which alone can lift the overwhelming majority up from the abyss of poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and powerlessness. Unless this can be initiated and sustained over two generation at least, no amount of pills, condoms and injections can curb the birth rate fast enough in Bangladesh.

Needed: Population planning not control

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