Fertility rate needs check: Azad
Making Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh point in case for failing the country to achieve desired total fertility rate (TFR), health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Wednesday said, population growth was a matter of “serious concern”, as it had an adverse impact on the available national resources.
Initiating a debate on a resolution on population stabilisation in Lok Sabha, the minister said, TFR in central Indian states, including Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, was almost double of the desired level of 2.1.
“Central India is a matter of serious concern for us. We need to change this trend. There has been no change in the TFR there and it is unfortunate,” he said, adding that the TFR is calculated as the average number of children of a couple in their lifetime. “We talk about rising costs of essential commodities, inflation... All these are a direct result of increasing population and limited availability of resources in the country,” he reasoned. He said that the Population Stabilisation Policy was introduced in 2000 under the NDA rule led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajyapee and under which the government had set a target of achieving 2.1 TFR before 2010.
It was estimated that if this rate of TFR were achieved in the first decade, the population of the country would stabilise by 2045. However, only Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Sikkim, Chandigarh, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands could achieve this TFR, he said.
Maintaining that the government would not impose “quotas” on officers on number of sterilisations and also refrain from giving out incentives likes promotions, the health minister said, the main culprit for high growth in population was early marriages of girls.
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