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New Delhi: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) announced on July 2 that women who are pregnant or lactating can now take the vaccine against COVID-19. The Union Health Ministry said that it has made the decision based on the recommendations of the expert panel National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI). As it expands the eligibility criteria to help protect expecting mothers and their unborn babies from the disease, there have been many myths floating around on social media, as a result, India is seeing vaccine hesitancy in that group.
According to the vaccination data available with the union health ministry, around 19.59 crore women and 22.45 crore men have received covid-19 vaccines so far.
Uttar Pradesh’s proposed bill to enforce a “two-child norm” tries to link state government jobs, local government positions and welfare to the two-child norm through a series of incentives and disincentives. With the communally tinged rhetoric around this bill gaining currency, it is necessary to revisit the Supreme Court’s controversial judgment in
Javed v State of Haryana (2003) where such problematic provisions relating to panchayat elections were upheld.
The Uttar Pradesh (UP) Population (Control, Stabillisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021 was recently made public by the UP State Law Commission with a view to seek public comments (Upadhyay 2021). The bill which intends to enforce a two-child norm across UP seeks to do so through a mixture of incentives and disincentives which relate to public employment with the state, eligibility to contest local body elections and entitlement to welfare benefits and subsidies from the state.
When Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath chose the occasion of World Population Day on July 11 to announce a new state population policy, there normally should have been no quarrel about it. After all, the state is India’s most populous, harbouring nearly 200 million people (as per Census 2011) or 17 per cent of India’s population. If it were to become a nation, Uttar Pradesh would have the fifth largest population in the world.
So instead of welcoming a policy to control the state’s burgeoning population, why was there such a storm over Yogi’s announcement? Sure, some of the birth control measures are coercive. While pushing for a two-child policy per couple, the state plans to introduce both incentives and disincentives to ensure its implementation. In terms of incentives, government servants adopting the two-child norms would get two additional increments during their service apart from being eligible for maternity or paternity leave for 12 months with full salar