It was an unusual coincidence. In 1810, when King Balaram Varma of Travancore died in Thiruvananthapuram, his wife Rani Lakshmi Bai succeeded to the throne. In the early 19th Century it was not strange for a lady of the palace to succeed a king without male heir and thus save the kingdom from the East India Company’s grab.
But Travancore was not on the Company’s radar. Lakshmi Bai’s ascension therefore was smooth and unsurprising. What was unusual was of her being followed to the royal seat, upon her passing away, by another princess, Rani Gouri Parvathi Bai, in 1815, and thereafter, in 1829, by yet another, Swati Tirunal, who ruled till 1847. That created a potent window of 37 years of absolute woman power in Travancore.
When something similar happened in the princely state of Bhopal, it was a different age and the players were different. But the women rulers of Travancore were assertive. They made Travancore a kingdom with a difference, and a century and a half later, that makes Kerala, with Travancore at its core, an Indian state with a difference.
The young Gouri Parvathi was a woman of vision who proclaimed, back in 1817, that “the state would defray the entire cost of the education of its people” so that “enlightenment could spread among them without hindrance.” The year 1817 is also the year when Calcutta, the capital of British India, witnessed the setting up of Hindu College, the first centre of Western education in Asia. But the women rulers of Travancore had achieved something that most of the Bengali elite and their British masters could not grasp. In Travancore, the queens empowered their women subjects to exercise their choice at home.
Its effect is visible now, with Kerala being a gloriously outlier state, followed perhaps by neighbouring Tamil Nadu, in India’s worrisome demographic map. With ‘first world’ levels of literacy, and women’s fertility rates (number of children a woman gives birth to in her reproductive years) as low as in rich and greying countries like Japan and Italy, Kerala is a showpiece for those who have faith in the developing nations.
But the ‘India story’ is quite different. The 2011 census operations started now are expected to find the population at 1.2 billion and still rising vigorously enough to replace China as the world’s most populous country by 2025. Earlier projections had put the date in 2040. If Kerala and Tamil Nadu are moving close to the Western world economies in curbing population growth, the opposite is happening in seven northern states and Orissa whose runaway demography baffles economic planners. They all have women fertility rates ranging above three (meaning that children will outnumber their parents), with Bihar having a staggering four.
South of the Vindhyas, on the other hand, women have long since been giving birth to fewer children that are necessary to replace the population at the current level. But the population pressure from the north has skewed the country’s demographic profile. Its cumulative impact is to add one million people to the labour force each month in the next 20 years, though there is little guarantee that so many extra jobs will be there. National welfare schemes like the PDS and Mahatma Gandhi NREG, ill-governed as they generally are, have been bursting at their seams due to the galloping population. Even Union health and family welfare minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, a cautious politician wary of backlash against coercive methods to rein in population rise, recently had to write to the prime minister painting a rather dismal picture of the success of government’s policy of curbing population growth by persuasion alone.
Azad should know the price that may await politicians who dare choose coercive methods. In 1975, when he was an acolyte of Sanjay Gandhi, and Emergency was in force, the government was in a fix with the annual exponential growth rate of population hovering above 2.25 per cent since 1971. Karan Singh, the then health minister, wrote to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi: “The problem of rapid population growth is now so serious that there seems no alternative to...introduction of...compulsion” (Source: Shah Commission proceedings). Sanjay Gandhi, the “extra-constitutional authority” of the day, took off from there and launched a campaign of forcible mass-sterilisation that made the regime so unpopular that it brought down the government within two years. On the other hand, neighbouring China, which hadn’t yet started its journey along the ‘capitalist road,’ had enforced a ‘one-child’ norm, from which it greatly benefited in poverty alleviation. With nobody to question state policy in a dictatorial set-up, it gave China a decisive lead over India in poverty alleviation, and, at a later date, in entering the global big league.
With state compulsion in family planning not an option for India, its planners have focused on infant mortality (IM), which is supposedly an indicator, among other things, of a stable population. It is an empirical view that gained widespread acceptability following an abrupt drop in the death rate of under-one year old babies in the early 20th Century across Europe, which coincided with diminishing birth rates. Though India’s IM tally has vastly improved, from 122 baby deaths per 1,000 live births in 1961 to 58 in 2005, the picture remains heavily distorted, with the expected stellar performance of Kerala (14 in 2005) hugely offset by Rajasthan’s 68, Uttar Pradesh’s 73, Orissa’s 75 and Madhya Pradesh’s 76. On the population issue, the Union government would rather put all its faith on the IM factor. Family Welfare Department’s star programme Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) integrates cash assistance to below-poverty pregnant women with ante-natal care during pregnancy and institutional care during delivery and after. Can JSY alone defuse the ‘population bomb’?
Doubtful. Infant death rates are not always a reliable pointer to downswings in the average fertility rate of women. There are states where the fertility rate has significantly dropped but the IM rate hasn’t fallen much, or at least to a proportionate extent. Andhra Pradesh, for that matter, has its fertility rate close to that of Kerala, but its IM rate has taken 44 years from 1961 to 2005 to drop from 91 to 57. It is just one short of India’s average. So is Punjab, a fertility rate champion but IM rate laggard.
Women do not over-procreate by their own will. Pregnancy is a gruelling task, and rearing child as mother involves a commitment at least no less than that of the father. It requires that she has the authority to decide when she would have her child, and when would the next come, if at all. What Rani Gouri Parvathi, the second of the Travancore serial princesses, perhaps meant by enlightenment “spreading without hindrance” was to give woman the power to decide if and when she’d have a child. Unfortunately, half the women in India become mothers by their 20th birthday, causing a flood of babies never quite wanted.
About the author: Sumit Mitra is a freelance senior journalist