In Satara, couples defer babies for cash carrots ……Mansi Choksi
Satara: In a dimly lit house in Bopegaon, 21-year-old Swati Jadhav is busy plaiting a six-year-olds oily hair. She has just finished feeding her lunch, thrown her faded school uniform on a pile of clothes that need to be washed and even done the dishes with the girl on her hip.
The chemistry between the two has confused many into assuming that their bond is biological even though the six-year-old is only a daily visitor from the hut next door. As much as Swati would like love to coddle her own baby, she will have to wait. At least till Independence Day.
This is because Swati and her husband Mangesh are bound by an unusual promise they made to the district of Satara two years ago. Mangesh, an MSC graduate farmer, convinced his wife to register with the Honeymoon Package under which they vowed to defer having children for two years after marriage. On August 15, the Jadhavs will redeem their pledge and will be among those who will celebrate a different kind of self-determination. For putting parenthood on hold, they will get a cheque of Rs 5,000.
The Honeymoon Package is the brainchild of enthusiastic health officials of Satara who realised that dangling a carrot was better than wielding a stick or surgical knife for population control.
2,500 births delayed in Satara
Satara: Even as China has begun to relax its stringent one child policy in the face of an ageing population (nearly 22% of Shanghai is over 60 years), Satara (seven hours from Mumbai) has taken baby steps towards the same goal but without demanding the same sacrifice. The sugar-and-windmill rich district, which produces a large number of soldiers, is better off than the impoverished drought-prone Vidarbha region.
In 2007, Sataras officials introduced the voluntary scheme with a corpus of Rs 6 crore from the National Rural Health Mission to curb the rising birth rate in the area. If couples who had tied the knot after April 2007 registered themselves with the zilla parishad and deferred having children for two years, they were promised an incentive of Rs 5,000. Couples who opted to wait a third year would earn Rs 7,500. Although this may appear to be a modest amount, it is tempting in Satara considering the wealthiest residents earn around Rs 15,000 per month and those below the poverty line make roughly Rs 2,000 a month (the average daily wage is Rs 70).
On August 15, 485 couples will be facilitated with a tilak, shawl, dry coconut, certificate and a laminated cheque of Rs 5,000 at the local gram panchayat for doing their bit to slow the galloping Indian population. A total of 2,366 other couples in Satara district will be awarded during the year as and when they finish their two-year vow.
As word of the honeymoon offer spread across the 380 primary health care centres, officials reaped an early harvest of 250 registrations in the first month itself. Not only did every single public health care centre display a poster of the scheme in Marathi, impassioned doctors, nurses, wardboys and attendants went knocking on the doors of newlyweds to tell them about it.
Satara district in Western Maharashtra has a population of around 28 lakh with a girl:boy ratio of 995:1,000. District medical officer Dr V Phalake says that there are roughly 25,000 marriages every year and more than 80% result in a baby in the first year. This is mainly because of the widespread belief that a child born in the first year of marriage is healthy. Dr Phalake said that roughly 10% (2,366 couples) of the couples had participated in this program and 2,500 births had been delayed. The birthrate of the district is steadily dropping from the previous 17 births per thousand. It will become 15 by 2010, he says, the eyes behind his thick spectacles lighting up.
Vivek Baid, president of the Mission for Population Control, gives the experiment a thumbs up even though his NGO advocates permanent family planning measures like ligation and vasectomy. It will work like a temporary family planning device like IUD, birth control pills and condoms. The financial benefits added to this package will motivate couples to delay childbirth, he says.
Indeed, says Dr Phalake, that is the idea. The idea is to delay births, not deprive parents of the joy of parenthood, he says. One should not forget that for every couple that is having the child after completion of the scheme, more are signing up.
The scheme has attracted couples from different sections of society and with different motives. For some its the money, for others its the ideal of small family and for still others where husbands or wives work in cities, it is simply a honeymoon of convenience. Mangesh registered so that Savita could continue her studies. School teacher Jawade Sandeep Sampat Rao signed up because his wife works in Lonavla. For daily wage earner Vinod Waghmare and his wife Dhanashree the motive was financial. If it wasnt for the scheme, we would have had children in the first year of marriage. But now I want to open a fixed deposit from this money for the future of my child, he says.
While there is nothing seemingly Big Brotherish about the schemeits a far cry from Sanjay Gandhis forced sterilisation drivedelaying having a child is still frowned on in rural quarters. Most of the 2,000 couples who have signed on have kept it a closely guarded secret from parents and in-laws because of fear of disapproval. Jawade Rao was one of those who told his mother and it didnt go down well. Rao will not opt for the third-year Rs 7,500 payout because his mother didnt talk to him and his wife for days after she found out that they had agreed to take money for not having a child. We managed to talk to her but she cant wait anymore, he says.
Contraception workshops for the couples are regularly held and are followed by a compulsory pregnancy test. If positive, the couple is disqualified unless it chooses to opt for an abortion. But none of the 155 that tested positive opted for a termination because of the risks involved or pressure from inlaws. It is difficult to argue with old people, they get upset very fast, says a district health official.
The model has attracted interest from Assam and Jharkhand. Although India was the first country to have a nation family planning policy, its stand has been inconsistent. Recently, union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azads statement that electricity and more television sets in villages would bring down the rate of reproduction evoked howls of protest, though many secretly agreed with the ministers view. An on World Population Day on July 11, an overzealous I M Perumal, Karnatakas health secretary, suggested drafting a law that would throw parents who had more than two children behind bars.
But the government has realised that force will not work. The fight against population cannot be won in India either by forcible sterilisation or by blindly following the Chinese one child model, says Baid. We will only convert citizens into lawbreakers if we follow those models. We should instead concentrate on creating awareness about the benefits of family planning. Satara has only made a beginning.
* PARENTHOOD ON HOLD: Mangesh Jadhav and his wife Swati will receive Rs 5,000 on I-Day for not having children for at least two years after their marriage
* MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE: Daily wage earner Vinod Waghmare and his wife went for the 3rd-Year option of the Honeymoon Package