I am so delighted today, rare in these times. Zohran Mamdani’s victory against all odds.
His father Mahmood Mamdani’s book The Myth of Population Control inspired my Ph.D thesis.
A bit of a background to this. A widely accepted demographic transition theory was that birth rates fell when societies urbanised, industrialised, were not based family labour to sustain families. This theory was based on the demographic experience of First World countries.
This meant of course that Third World countries, where birth rates were rising, could not expect birth rates to fall, since there was no demand for family planning services. Families were valued for the security they provided in old age. Children worked on family owned lands. Also, given high infant and child mortality, it made little sense to have few children.
Then arrived the monumental Khanna study (The Khanna Study: Population Problems in Rural Punjab, Harvard University Press,1971). Public health scholars from Harvard carried out this very well-funded study in Punjab over a period of five years. Their findings–that the Punjab peasantry welcomed contraception overthrew the demographic transition theory: here were peasants seeking contraception.
It was on the basis of this study that India began the family planning programme, that sucked funds from health programmes and turned into a behemoth, victimising the poorest and most marginalised.
On this study was based the most expensive health programme in the world. The Rockefeller Foundation supported the study and the family planning programme as well.
Mamdani shows in the book, that the Punjabi peasant was not a foolish superstitious person. He, yes, he, had reasons to want more sons and as a result had more children. They were economic assets, daughters were not. They provided security in old age. But this perception varied among different sections of the peasantry. The really poor agricultural labourers in fact had the smallest families.
Other quantitative data had their own problems, as Prof. Krishnaji’s work had revealed.
So the idea that the poor had large families was a total myth, created Neo-Malthusian imaginations.
Since Mamdani’s work was largely anecdotal, I decided to do a multi-method study in Mandya district in Karnataka, carrying out field work for two years. My study gave both quantitative and qualitative depth to Mamdani’s work. The lowest family size is among landless labourers, irrespective of caste. Family size increases with landholding up to the rich peasant class, after which it starts declining.
My Ph.D thesis is with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and should be available on the website of JNU. It forms a chapter in my book, From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic (Sage, 2004.)
My Ph.D is therefore Zohran Mamdani’s sibling!
By Mohan Rao
The author was a professor at the Centre for Community Health and Social Medicine, JNU.
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