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november 15, 2014

Economic & PoliticalWeekly EPW november 15, 2014 vol xlix no 46 7

Killing Women to Curb Population

The Chhattisgarh tragedy will repeat unless governments accept womens rights.

Alaparoscopic tubectomy is supposed to be a simple oper-

ation. Yet in the hands of some surgeons, it would

not be an exaggeration to call it butchery. For what else

can you say when 83 poor women are coerced, enticed, duped

to go to a sterilisation camp in a disused hospital in Takhatpur

block of Bilaspur district in Chhattisgarh. There they are

lined up on a dirty floor, and within five hours, surgeons

operate on them and tie up their fallopian tubes. Within two

days, eight of them are dead, another three die a day later and

20 are critical. The doctor who headed the entire operation, a

man feted by the state government earlier in the year for hav-

ing personally done 50,000 tubectomies, has been arrested

and the families of the dead women given cash compensation.

But does this deal with the policy that inevitably results in

such atrocities?

What happened in Chhattisgarh is a reminder of the continu-

ing callous approach of the centre and state governmentstowards what is euphemistically termed population stabilisation.

Despite years of struggle to establish that population growth is

about people, and principally about women, and that their

rights and health must be the central pivot on which any policy

is shaped, we still continue with these barbaric sterilisation

camps where poor women are treated as little more than cattle.

That the men who operated on them should even be called

surgeons is questionable given that they wilfully violated all

guidelines, including those of the Supreme Court setting a limit

of 30 operations per day and only 10 per instrument. Instead, they

performed 83 tubectomies within five hours, or an operation every

four minutes or so. Only three laparoscopes were used for this,

obviating any chance of mandatory sterilisation. The womens

prior health condition was not checked, they were not kept back

for four hours after the operation as is required and there was

no follow-up visit within 40 hours. When complications set in,

death was inevitable.

Horrific as are these details, they represent only part of a

much larger and murkier story being played out in many other

states. These tragedies occur with alarming regularity because

India has abandoned both international and national commit-

ments to adopt a humane and gender-sensitive approach

towards population growth. After the Emergency, when forcedsterilisation led not just to Indira Gandhis rout in the elections

but also posed a serious setback to all health programmes, some

rethinking had begun. This culminated in the 1994 United

Nations International Conference on Population and Develop-

ment (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt where India along with 178 coun-

tries made a commitment to anchor all population policies in

womens reproductive rights and health and gender equity.

Following this, the Indian government specifically agreed to

discard its earlier policy of giving monetary incentives and

setting targets and instead acknowledged the need to give a ll

women access to safe contraception. In 2000, the National

Population Policy adopted under the previous National Demo-

cratic Alliance (NDA) government also reflected this approach

and went further by linking education, sanitation, supply of

safe drinking water, housing and womens empowerment to

any strategy to deal with the growing population.

Yet today, one in every five women in India does not have

access to safe contraception, and the regime of targets and

incentives continues unabated in many states. This NDAgovern-ment appears to have no memory of what its predecessor accepted.

This is evident in some of the remarks made by the recently

replaced Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan who spoke of

reviving the 1992 bill that will disqualify MPs and MLAswith

more than two children, a law that one presumed had been

buried. A similar law that applies to elected members of

panchayats exists in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha,

Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. These states also continue

to hold sterilisation camps, as do Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

And every now and then stories similar to the recent scandal

emanating from Chhattisgarh are reported.

The common factor in all these inhuman interventions is the

complete lack of any respect for the rights of the women under

the knife. They are always poor women, often tribal; they are

lured by the monetary incentive provided; they are not in-

formed about the nature of the procedure, or of possible compli-

cations following it; and many of them are unaware that the

procedure is terminal.

Where does this fit within the concept of reproductive choice

and rights, that the Government of India is supposed to have

accepted more than 20 years ago? And where is gender equality

when only women are being compelled to take the responsibility

for limiting families when a vasectomy is much simpler and aless dangerous terminal method? There are roughly 19 times more

tubectomies performed each year as compared to vasectomies.

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EDITORIALS

november 15, 2014 vol xlix no 46 EPW Economic & PoliticalWeekly8

Even if, under pressure from public anger, the Chhattisgarh

government moves against the health officials responsible for

this atrocity, there will be no end to such incidents unless there

is a clear and full understanding of the concept of womens re-

productive rights and health and its centrality for all health and

population programmes.