CHINA POPULATION POLICY
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INDIA POPULATION POLICY
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Before Deng Xiaoping took over, China was under the political control of Mao Zedong, who strongly advocated for more births so that China will have a larger manpower (Fitzpatrick, 2009). During Chairman Mao's rule, China's fertility rate was as high as four children per woman (Moore, 2014), twice that of the recommended rate (2.1). Instead of bringing benefits to the country, the high birth rate has resulted in a lack of food supply. The famine during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) has also raised entered millions of people dying from starvation (Open Yale Courses, 2009). Thus, Deng strongly pushed for the enforcement of one-child policy to ensure the sustainability of the country.
Deng also feels that a controlled population will benefit economic reform. In the 1970s, China's economy was on the brink of collapse after the Cultural Revolution as well as the Great Leap Forward. The annual growth in GDP was estimated to only be at 4.4% (Morrison, 2014). Hence, Deng pushed for the one-child policy so as to reduce China's state of poverty and to have more capital left to engage in trading activities with other countries (open-door policy) instead of spending these capital on feeding the people. |
India has one of the longest, national history of population policy under the implementation of the Five-Year Plans policies and it began in the 1950s. The population growth rate in the 1941 to 1951 had been less than 1.3 percent annually (U.S. Library of Congress, 2015) . Hence, the India’s government began a series of industrialization policies and elevate the standard of living of its people by first, reducing its population growth rate.
Starting from the 1950s, some of the actions that the government took to reduce its population rate were to make information on birth control available in hospitals, promoting the usage of contraceptives, educating the public on the advantages of having a small size family by organizing more family planning programs, an initiative to increase monetary incentives for sterilization, re-housing after slum clearance to those who underwent sterilization, and setting up of sterilization camp which had a huge impact. from forty-one per 1,000 to a target of twenty to twenty-five per 1,000 by the mid-1970s. By 1991, India had more than 150,000 public health facilities through which family planning programs were offered. Four special family planning projects were implemented under the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985-1989) and they were namely the All-India Hospitals Post-partum Programme at district and subdistrict-level hospitals, reorganization of primary health care facilities in urban slum areas, reserving a specified number of hospital beds for tubal ligature operations and the renovation or remodelling of intrauterine device (IUD) rooms in rural family welfare centers attached to primary health care facilities.
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