Bop and Marketing

Fifty years of independence in India have brought with them a mixed bag ofj achievements and failures. While India has become nearly self sufficient foodgrains in the wake of Green Revolution ushered in the country by the use of I hybrid varieties of wheat in the late sixties and early seventies, an effective check on population growth has eluded the nation and we are nearing the mark of one billion souls at the turn of the century.

Our agriculture scientists have successfully met the challenge of meeting the growing needs of food of a burgeoning population, but our socio-political leadership has failed to make a decisive impact in the sphere of family planning. The untiring efforts of the scientists, ably supported by the ingenuity of our farmers, have tamed the nature to bring forth abundance of crops, but we have miserably failed to cultivate the minds of our people with education to persuade them to limit the size of their families.

Increase in production of goods and supply of services have been outstripped by growth in population and our country still remains at the bottom of the list of nations in terms of indices of development like per capita income, per capita consumption of electricity and infant mortality rate etc.

The reasons for India's failure on the population front are many. Firstly, the family planning programme largely remained a government programme; it rarely assumed the character of a popular community programme. Like most government schemes, it got entangled in red tape and failed to gain sufficient momentum. Awareness building campaigns were not followed by effective delivery of contraceptives and timely incentives. Incentive money either reached the targetted individuals very late or never reached at all. No foolproof mechanism was evolved to ensure that different components of the programme-awareness building, supply of contraceptives, conducting vasectomy and tubectomy operations on the targetted individuals and finally grant of...