by Bhavya Dabas

Created on: October 20, 2009

India's ever growing population has a number of factors contributing to it, such as these.

1. Insufficient awareness of family planning techniques, stemming from illiteracy and poverty. A huge fraction of India's population still resides in rural areas or slums in the cities, and has insufficient access to educational facilities. Plus, a lot of these people are extremely poor, and they cannot afford to send their children to school. They prefer to have the kids begin working at as young an age as they are able to, to bring in some extra money. These illiterate and poverty stricken people have little or no idea of what birth control is and how it can be practised. A lot of them believe that more children mean more hands to work, and so they think that having more children is a good idea. They overlook the fact that more children also mean more mouths to feed.

2. The desire for male offspring. Traditional Indian families still believe that it is absolutely essential to have a son, because only a son will carry on the family name and support the parents in their old age. Couples with daughters continue to have more children until they have a son. There have been cases of couples having as many as twenty daughters before they finally have a son.

3. Insufficient sex education. There is little or no formal sex education in schools or colleges, and there are taboos around talking about sex. Parents do not educate their children sufficiently at home on vital issues surrounding reproduction. Children are strongly discouraged from talking about it.

4. Early marriages, including child marriages. The legal age for girls to marry is eighteen, and twenty one for boys, but these rules are not enforced. Girls are sometimes married off at age six or so. Such girls are taught to believe that the business of their lives is to bear children and to take care of their husband and family. They begin to bear children as soon as they hit puberty. They have a large number of children, and pass on the same school of thought to their offspring.

The key reform that India needs is education and awareness. People need to be brought out of their preconceived notions and their ignorance. They need to have easy and inexpensive access to family planning methods, but, more importantly, they need to have the motivation to make good use of them.

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