Population Control Brutality in India

Doomsday predictions and authoritarian governments have been a deadly combination across the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to the work of scientists like Paul Ehrlich, governments around the world were convinced that an increasing human population would lead to mass starvation. They attempted to reduce the size of the human population by promoting so-called family planning programs. This push for population control by extremists in the US government, United Nations, and World Bank, incentivized coercive sterilization campaigns in poor nations like China and India. Chelsea Follett describes how in 1974, Henry Kissinger wrote a National Security Council Memorandum encouraging the US government to reduce the average number of children per family to just two children, and that poor nations like India should be specifically targeted, “…through aid and through UN agencies, [to] ‘assist’ with the goal of ‘population moderation.’ The memorandum urges ‘explicit consideration’ of ‘mandatory programs’” (p. 12).

Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley write about mass sterilization campaigns that took place in India between 1975 and 1977, under the reign of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The Prime Minister’s son, Sanjay Gandhi, was put in charge of the program and went all in. The Indian government enforced this campaign using a variety of coercive measures. For the unsterilized, hospitals refused to provide treatment, wages and property were stolen, access to water was denied, school faculty members and students were threatened financially and academically, housing was denied, businesses were given licenses contingent on their participating in the sterilization campaign, and the police rounded up random people in public for sterilization.

Follett estimates that the Indian government sterilized around 11 million people, and Tupy and Pooley write that “The majority of Sanjay Gandhi’s 11 million victims were vasectomized men. An additional 1 million women were fitted with IUDs…” and around 2000 people died from the procedures (p. 69).

The human population today is greater than at any point in history and yet we have fewer famines and more food than in centuries past. This is because human beings aren’t a plague of locusts that simply consume resources, but they are problem solvers and creators that discover new ways produce more abundance with fewer resources.

— Colin Braman

References

Chelsea Follett (2020). Neo-Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India: Overpopulation Concerns Often Result in Coercion. Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 897. Retrieved from: Neo-Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India: Overpopulation Concerns Often Result in Coercion | Cato Institute

Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley (2023). Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. Cato Institute.