STATE SPONSORED FAMILY PLANNING PROGRAMMES ARE THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY OF REDUCING POPULATION GROWTH IN DEVELOPING
Every year approximately 83 million people are being added to the world’s population, ninety percent of which is in developing countries. The question of whether this population increase is having a positive or negative impact upon welfare in these countries is a controversial issue from which there has, over the last decade emerged a common ground upon which both sides of the debate could agree. To quote Robert Cassen in ‘Population Policy: A New Consensus’ ‘…there is a new international consensus among and between industrial countries and developing countries that individual countries and the world at large would be better off if population were to grow more slowly’ This assignment, seeks to uncover the most successful means of reducing this population growth and in doing so, must inevitably look at the mechanisms that are leading to such unprecedented high levels of growth. ... Economists regard excessive household demand for children as the engine that is driving the high rates of population growth and thus seek to remedy this through demand side policies. Demographers take an alternate stance, believing instead that households do not want these extra children, but are constrained due to a lack of family planning programs and target the ‘supply of children’ through this vehicle. ... This economic theory of fertility assumes that the household demand for children is determined by the family prefences for a certain number of surviving (preferably male) children, by the opportunity cost of rearing these children and the levels of family income. ... In many developing countries, children do indeed contribute significantly to household income. ... Dasgupta in his work ‘Population, resources and Welfare’ adopts an almost Malthusian outlook upon this matter, suggesting that the high rates of fertility in sub Saharan Africa and in parts of northern India lead to the fulfilment of Garrat Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ scenario in which there is severe environmental degradation resulting from the over use of common grazing lands. This in turn results in greater poverty of the rural population, which then leads each household to demand more children to gather the firewood and the water that is necessary for the household to function, which leads to further degradation of the local commons. ... She uses the example of Ramanagaram in which water only comes every three days and the children have to tie enough water for the family foir three days on to their bicycles and then cycle thos water back home.