For the last policy series post, I want to do India, because it's so notorious I feel I couldn't not mention it.
I also want to post this link to an article on the BBC which talks about the dangers when man tries to control population.
The following about India is an excerpt from the article (as is the photo):
Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay (above) presided over a mass sterilisation campaign. From the mid-1970s, Indian officials were set sterilisation quotas, and sought to ingratiate themselves with superiors by exceeding them. Stories abounded of men being accosted in the street and taken away for the operation. The head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, congratulated the Indian government on "moving effectively" to deal with high birth rates. Funding was increased, and the sterilising went on.
In Delhi, some 700,000 slum dwellers were forcibly evicted, and given replacement housing plots far from the city centre, frequently on condition that they were either sterilised or produced someone else for the operation. In poorer agricultural areas, whole villages were rounded up for sterilisation. When residents of one village protested, an official is said to have threatened air strikes in retaliation.
"There was a certain madness," recalls Nina Puri of the Family Planning Association of India. "All rationality was lost."
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