Q.The Family Planning Programme suffered a setback during the years of national emergency. Justify the statement.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The Emergency's coercive sterilisation drive—marked by targets, force, and mass vasectomies—destroyed public trust in family planning, turning a health programme into a symbol of state brutality and setting back voluntary acceptance for years.
The National Emergency declared in June 1975 transformed India's family planning programme from a voluntary public health initiative into an instrument of authoritarian excess. What had been a slow, persuasive effort to encourage smaller families became, almost overnight, a campaign defined by compulsion, fear, and the violation of bodily autonomy. The consequences were catastrophic, not just in immediate human suffering but in the long-term damage to the very idea of family planning in India.
At the heart of the disaster was the shift from persuasion to coercion. Sanjay Gandhi, the Prime Minister's younger son who wielded enormous extra-constitutional power during the Emergency, made population control one of his five-point programme priorities. State governments, eager to demonstrate loyalty and efficiency, translated this into aggressive sterilisation targets. Officials at every level—from district collectors to village health workers—were given quotas to meet. The programme ceased to be about informed choice and became about numbers.
The methods employed were brutal and indiscriminate. Mass sterilisation camps were organised where men, and sometimes women, were rounded up and operated upon with little regard for medical safety or consent. Police and lower-level officials used threats, intimidation, and outright force. In many states, sterilisation certificates became prerequisites for government jobs, ration cards, land allotments, even the release of pending salaries. Slum clearances in Delhi and other cities often went hand-in-hand with forced vasectomies. The poor and marginalised—those with the least power to resist—bore the brunt of the campaign.
The focus fell disproportionately on vasectomy rather than tubectomy, partly because the male procedure was quicker and cheaper to perform in camp settings. This made it easier to meet targets rapidly, but it also meant that men, who had not traditionally been the focus of family planning outreach, were suddenly the primary victims of coercion.
The scale was staggering. Millions of sterilisations were performed in a single year, far exceeding anything achieved in the programme's previous two decades. But the human cost was equally immense. Botched operations, infections, and deaths from unsafe procedures were widely reported. Men returned to their villages humiliated, in pain, and sometimes unable to work. Rumours spread—some true, some exaggerated—about the dangers and indignities of sterilisation. In a society where fertility and virility carried deep cultural significance, the programme became a source of shame and rage. …
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