Policy fashions come and go

India's craft may yet redefine 'Made in India'

- AJIT BALAKRISHNAN

When I was a student at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in the late 1960s and early 1970S, passionately interested in societal trends like all college students from that era, the biggest topic for intellectual debate was - hold your breath - "Family planning as the key to India's economic development".

Back then, this theme was as prominent in public policy debate as artificial intelligence (AI) is today.

Some Indian family planning slogans from the 1960s included "Hum do, hamare do" ("The two of us, and our two children"), and "Agla bachcha abhi nahin, teen ke baad kabhi nahin" ("The next child not yet, and no more after three"). We encountered these slogans on roadside hoardings, in cinemas, and in newspapers. The Indian Post and Telegraph Department even issued two and a half million copies of the commemorative postage stamp captioned "Plan Your Family Week".

International bodies like the United Nations, the World Bank, and even private charitable organisations like the Ford Foundation were prominent in this cause to save India. Headlines daily reported the government's push for new methods of birth control, including intrauterine devices (IUDs) and the first domestically produced condom, Nirodh, often targeting poorer communities. The lament then was that India had 14 per cent of the world's population ... on only 2.4 per cent of the world's land area.

I smile to myself now when I see contemporary headlines, like this one from