Planning an Indian modernity: the gendered politics of fertility control.

Abstract

With a population estimated at over 971 million India is expected to overtake China as the worlds most populous country in the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding the growing debate among social scientists activists and policy makers about linkages between population development and the environment in the public mind India continues to be associated with images of "teeming" and "exploding" masses mired in human degradation ecological devastation and civil strife. In this context it bears pointing out that the Indian state was the first in the world to initiate an official population control program in 1952. Nearly fifty years later assessments of the Indian family planning programs performance are mixed but the Indian fertility rate is declining despite overall population growth. Our interest in this article is not to argue for or against population control or to evaluate Indias success or failure in this regard but to address Indias state-sponsored population control program-its history ideology and strategies-and to examine the contours of a nationalist modernist project that is by definition gendered and classed and an ongoing product of struggles between multiple actors both beyond and within the state. We argue that Indian family planning intervention which is part of a broad postcolonial developmental agenda represents both an appropriation of and resistance to a hegemonic Western conception of the modern. We analyze the national fertility control programs domestication of modernity through a selective indigenization of modernitys core values noting that at another level this process-the linking of individual and family reproductive behavior to national welfare and the promotion of modernity as embodied practice-is itself an inherently modern project as is the phenomenon of government planning. Furthermore we draw attention to the overtly paternalistic and elitist character of the Indian fertility control program that targets women of all classes and the poor in general. (excerpt)