by MARK MAGNIER
Due to pass China in 2020, India has seen uneven progress in efforts to cut birthrates, and struggles to feed and house many of its people.
Aastha Arora is one in a billion. At least that’s what they called her when she was born on May 11, 2000.
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While China has slowed its birthrate dramatically under a controversial one-child campaign, India has relied on voluntary measures. India’s fertility rate has dropped by more than half since 1950, but progress has been uneven because population planning programs are run by individual states, not the central government.
India enacted more coercive methods from 1975 to 1977 during the so-called emergency period, which left a bitter taste. Ratna Jaitley, 75, then a teacher at a government school in New Delhi, said she was ordered to find men to sterilize or risk losing her job, a demand justified at the time for reasons of national development.
With great anguish, she offered up two families that washed and ironed clothes, one with six children, the other with eight, figuring they’d already had quite a few offspring.
“A lot of people in my position took undue advantage of the poor and the uneducated,” she said. “Many childless and newly married were sterilized.”
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When Aastha was born at 5:05 a.m. in New Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital — officials had expected a birth shortly after midnight, but other candidates were stillborn or ended up being born later — the hospital was inundated not only with reporters but doctors, senior bureaucrats and politicians eager to share the limelight. In front of the cameras, the dignitaries made all sorts of promises: that the family would enjoy free rail tickets for life, free medicine and free education and that the baby’s father would receive a government job.
Los Angeles Times for more
(Thanks to Asghar Vasanwala)