Ministry ready to welcome one billionth baby

NEW DELHI, APRIL 29: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has launched the Great Baby Hunt. A search is on for half-a-dozen or more n...

NEW DELHI, APRIL 29: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has launched the Great Baby Hunt. A search is on for half-a-dozen or more newborns, preferably female, one of whom will be anointed the one billionth citizen when India crosses the population Rubicon on May 11 this year.

Of course, the entire exercise is symbolic. A brief photo-op, maybe a television moment, some flowers or sweets for the mother and child if babudom is imaginative enough and then back to their humdrum lives.

With less than two weeks to D-Day, family welfare officials are scurrying around trying to shortlist six to eight expectant mothers registered with health centres here who are expected to deliver on the night of May 10-11.They are keeping their fingers crossed, hoping that one of them will surely arrive on time, going down in history as Citizen No One Billion.

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While crossing the billion mark is hardly a cause for celebration, the Ministry is looking at the occasion as an opportunity to send the message that curbing population has to be given priority.

So Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is being roped in to broadcast a message to the nation, which will be beamed on TV and radio. The Department of Posts has been asked to bring out a stamp and issue a first-day cover. The Finance Ministry is being requested to mint five-rupee coins with a small family message.

The Railways have been asked to print a short message on all tickets, telling people that there are choices ahead of them: choose one and keep the family small. Never mind that hardly anyone reads the small print on railway tickets.

There will also be a blitzkrieg of messages on TV and radio, released to all the channels and shown frequently during the run-up to May 11. The objective is to get people thinking about the population question.

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“For us May 11 provides an opportunity which we shall use to drive home the message of the small family norm. Every person should know he or she has a choice available,” said A R Nanda, Secretary, Family Welfare.

A sense of urgency has gripped Health Ministry officials because one of the major events scheduled for May 11 has fallen a victim to the drought. This was a national-level conference, organised by the Planning Commission, which would have brought together all Chief Ministers and experts within and outside the Government with the Prime Minister in the chair. The theme: “Population and Sustainable Development”. But with several states in the grip of a severe drought, the meeting has been called off.

Instead, the first meeting of the National Population Commission, headed by the Prime Minister, is scheduled after the current session of Parliament gets over. The Commission, set up under the recently-passed National Population Policy, will bring together chief ministers and state ministers of departments dealing with population and development, demographers and NGO representatives who will think about how to translate the policy into action.

Already the ball has been set rolling with the states declaring their own programmes to highlight the relationship between population growth, literacy and public health, especially maternal and neo-natal health care. Several states, led by Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, have already readied their own population policies.

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“We also want to highlight the challenges ahead. Problems like infant and maternal mortality,” says Nanda. With infant mortality hovering at around 71 per one thousand births and maternal mortality as high as 4.08 per thousand, a lot of ground remains to be covered.