The Uncertain Trumpet

Even as millions go to bed hungry, new mouths are born in India with metronomic regularity. This month the population soared over the 500-million mark, prompting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to complain that her task is a lot like "building a house on land that is constantly flooded." Having just completed a "family-planning fortnight" to sell anew the slogan that "A small family is a happy one," the government--which has been endorsing birth control for 36 years--is still looking for ways to make this revolutionary idea catch fire across the land.

Many Indian women think it is their duty to bear male heirs in order to please their husbands--and are thus puzzled by the slogan. Poor outcastes think of every new baby not as another mouth to feed but as a potential breadwinner for the family. Moslem mullahs (religious teachers) will not urge their believers to practice birth control for fear that the Hindus will go on proliferating and widen their population and political advantage.

Green for "Go." From the start, however, miscalculation by the program's planners set back the whole campaign. Indian experts now laugh at the Nehru government's drive to control births through the rhythm method. Even then it was known that peasant women, because of their exhausting chores and lack of nourishment, usually have irregular menstrual cycles. Moreover, the colored beads that the government distributed to the peasants for keeping track of the days--green for "go" and red for "stop"--failed for the astonishing reason that many women never looked at them until the lights were out, and then the colors were indistinguishable.

Even if birth-control pills were economical, it would be an uphill battle to train peasant women in their regular use. These days, the government is relying instead on the cheaper intrauterine plastic loop. Though it is about the simplest and most economical contraceptive available to India, the coil-shaped device has given rise to a host of rumors, one of them a report that it gives the husband an electric shock. More than 1,000,000 women have been fitted with the loops at clinics. Another 1,780,000 Indians have voluntarily undergone sterilization (for payments of less than $4). Even the sum of these two figures leaves the country a long way from its goal of cutting the birth rate from the present 41 per 1,000 to 25 per 1,000.

Support for Abstinence. Too often the government has set unreachable goals and succumbed to the euphoria of issuing reports and statistics rather than taking action. Next year, for example, it is promising to put up 10,000 more billboards with such slogans as "Use the Loop" and to show slides at intermissions in 5,000 movie theaters. For the vast propaganda drive that it needs, however, a mere $1,330,000 has been budgeted. So uncertain is the trumpet for birth control in India that the official most responsible for selling the urgency of contraceptives--Health and Family Planning Minister Sushila Nayar--believes that the best approach is brahmacharya, monklike abstinence.

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