50% of UP BJP MLAs have three or more children

NEW DELHI: In a draft bill aimed at controlling population, the UP government proposes to bar people with more than two children from contesting local body elections, applying for and getting promotion in government jobs and availing government subsidies. Ironically, if these provisions of the draft

Uttar Pradesh Population

(Control, Stabilization and Welfare) Bill, 2021, were to be applied for elections to the state’s legislative assembly, half of the MLAs of the ruling BJP would get disqualified.


According to information provided by the Uttar Pradesh state assembly, of the 397 current MLAs whose bio profiles are uploaded on its website, 304 are from the ruling party of which 152 (exactly half) have three or more children.

One of the MLAs has eight children — the highest in this list. There is one another with seven children. Apart from them, there are eight members with six children each while 15 are parents of five children each. Another 44 MLAs from the ruling party have four children each, while 83 have three children each. All of them would get disqualified if similar norms were to be applied to the state legislature.Another irony can be spotted on the Lok Sabha’s list of business. The BJP’s Gorakhpur MP and Bhojpuri film actor Ravi Kishan, who himself has four children, has been listed to introduce the Population Control Bill, 2019, which aims at controlling population growth in the country. Private member’s bills have little chance of being passed without the support of the government. According to

PRS Legislative

,

Parliament

has not passed any private members' bills since 1970.

Like the UP proposal, this bill too focuses on disincentivising couples having more than two children by making them ineligible for government jobs and subsidies. Incidentally, according to the Lok Sabha website,168 sitting MPs have three or more children of which 105 are BJP members.

In December last year, in response to a

PIL

seeking a population control law based on the China model, the union government told the Supreme Court that India was on the verge of achieving a replacement level of fertility rate of 2.1 through various voluntary birth control measures. It added that international experience like the China model showed that any coercion to have a certain number of children was counter-productive and would lead to demographic distortion.

The

Union health ministry

submitted that 25 of 36 states/ UTs had already achieved replacement level fertility of 2.1 or less. But 146 districts in seven states – UP (57), Bihar (37), Rajasthan (14), MP (25), Chhattisgarh (2), Jharkhand (9) and Assam (2) — had fertility rates above 3. According to the

Census

office, 2001-11 was the first decade in the last 100 years in which India added less to its population than in the previous one, it added.

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