Flood of Babies

Of all the places in the free world where a birth-control congress could count on local interest in the subject, India was No. 1. Speaking in New Delhi last week to the Sixth International Conference on Planned Parenthood, Britain's Sir Julian Huxley warned that India's "failure to solve her population problem will be a political and social disaster," while "success will secure her leadership in Asia and give hope to the world at large." Biologist Huxley called it absurd that in India's second five-year plan $14 million is being spent on malaria control, which "will certainly increase population, as against the $10 million for all measures that will reduce it. The balancing of death control by birth control is a matter of utmost urgency." India's population, now at 400 million, is growing at the rate of more than 6,000,000 a year.

Huxley was strongly supported by his fellow scientist, Homi J. Bhabha, who heads India's atomic energy projects. Bhabha was not enthusiastic about oral contraceptives, which, he said, cost too much and must be "used systematically and precisely," but "if some substance could be developed that could be mixed in one's daily diet and would have the effect of reducing the chance of conception by about 30%, the problem would be immediately solved." Indian delegates favored voluntary sterilization of all Indian couples with more than three children; the congress itself unanimously advocated sterilization as an effective and important measure to check population growth.

Indian public opinion, long nearly as hostile as the Roman Catholic Church to contraceptive measures, seems to be veering about. The newspaper Indian Express editorialized that it was time to recognize that even Mahatma Gandhi, who also opposed birth control, was not infallible: "As in some other matters where the Mahatma's outlook was rigid and doctrinaire, time, along with an oppressive sense of the realities, has induced a change." A fervent Gandhian disciple, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru added his persuasive voice by acknowledging that "a tremendous crisis might arise in the world with an indefinitely growing population." Noting that people in Europe and the Americas were "getting frightened at the prospect of the masses of Asia becoming vaster and vaster and swarming all over the place," Nehru conceded that it was "a legitimate fear."

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