If the suggested provisions for local body elections under this law will be extended to Assembly Elections, they would all be disqualified.
A draft for Population Control Bill has been released by the Uttar Pradesh Law Commission. However, had it been a law, 50% of the Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs in the state would have been in violation.
The proposed law promotes a two-child policy, and says those in violation will be barred from contesting local body elections, applying to government jobs or receiving any government subsidy.
However, according to The Times Of India, of the 397 MLAs whose bios are currently available on the assembly website, 304 are from the BJP. Among them, 152 have three or more children. If the suggested provisions for local body elections under this law will be extended to Assembly Elections, they would all be disqualified.
Though this is not the first time that BJP leaders have suggested a law that they themselves don’t follow. The Times of India reports that in 2019, the BJP MP who had been chosen to introduce a population control Bill in the Lok Sabha – Bhojpuri actor Ravi Kishan – himself has four children.
Opposition parties and women’s rights activists have criticised the proposed law by the Uttar Pradesh government, and many believe it will disproportionately target the poor.
As per the Wire’s report, the All India Democratic Women’s Association, the women’s wing of the CPI(M), issued a statement saying, “The Draft begins with the completely false and now abandoned premise that a large population is the cause of poverty and then goes on to punish the poor for their poverty and lack of access to education, healthcare and decent livelihood which are now universally recognised as crucial to controlling the birth-rate.”
“The Draft, in keeping with the practice of the Yogi Government, makes comments about ‘bigamy’ and about ‘communities’ that have more children. This has been done deliberately to try and communalise the issue of population planning and garner support for it from some sections,” it continues.
The Population Foundation of India(PFI), after China revised its two-child policy, issued a statement saying that India must learn from China’s failed experience with enforcing coercive population policies. The PFI said religion has little to do with fertility levels but what makes the difference is “education, employment opportunities and accessibility of contraceptives”.
Meanwhile data suggests that India’s population is set to start declining soon, and India’s total fertility rate (TFR) and annual population growth rate, which are used to quantify population growth, are declining.
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