Enterprise in Birth Control

India's government usually holds capitalistic impulses tightly in check. There is another impulse, however, that it has failed to curb, and so it is asking free enterprise for help in the most private of all sectors: birth control. Still far from its goal of keeping the growth of a highly fecund population (more than 500 million now) within the nation's food-producing capability, the Health and Family Planning Ministry has decided to enlist some of India's largest companies to distribute government-subsidized rubber condoms.

The government's 2,500 family-planning centers have been giving away those simplest and most primitive of contraceptives for some time, but the network is hardly adequate to service a nation of more than 566,000 villages. Even when a villager trudges 20 miles to a family-planning center to pick up a free condom, he may find the depot out of stock. Besides, many Indian peasants intuitively distrust any gifts from the government. The only really effective channel to the villagers is maintained by a few giant commercial enterprises that sell shopkeepers such everyday goods as soap, tea, cigarettes and matches. At the behest of the Ford Foundation, the Health Ministry began in 1966 to use this commercial pipeline for a pilot program in condom distribution in the Meerut District, an area of 3,000,000 people adjacent to New Delhi.

Instructions Included. The test seems to be working well, according to the distributor, Businessman Ram Saran Dass. Packets of the contraceptives are conspicuously hung up in groceries and betel-nut shops, and they are sold alongside candy, soda, neckties and other household items. All display India's ubiquitous family-planning emblem--a red triangle around a drawing of a family of four, the official ideal. The condoms carry the brand name Nirodh, a Sanskrit word roughly translatable as "freedom from fear." Indian men have been enthusiastic customers, partly because the contraceptives cost less than 2-c- for a packet of three. Of course, there have been some problems. Though family planners had assumed that the contraceptive's shape would suggest the method of use, and enclosed instructions in each package just to be safe, the idea has sometimes been hard to get across. Government demonstrators stretched sheaths over bamboo sticks, but peasants wondered later why the magic did not work when they, too, faithfully stretched them over bamboo. Even so, the test appears successful enough for India's new Health Minister, Dr. Sripati Chandrasekhar, who holds a Ph.D. in demography from New York University, to try out the scheme on a nationwide basis in September. The Health Ministry is negotiating with such large firms as Lipton, Imperial Tobacco, Hindustan Lever, Union Carbide, and Tata Oil Mills Co. to handle distribution. The companies do not expect enormous profits from the birth control sideline, but they see it as a useful demonstration of cooperation between government and private enterprise. By enlisting the companies, New Delhi will have up to a million retail outlets at its disposal.

The Y.M.C.A. Method. Chandrasekhar agrees with critics that India's birth control efforts have been snarled by red tape and hurt by wishful thinking, such as his spinster predecessor's plea for brahmacharya (monklike abstinence). Nor does he place his hopes on any single method to defuse India's population time bomb. While other experts have alternatively argued for the intrauterine loop, sterilization or the pill, Chandrasekhar recognizes that none alone can provide the answer; popular fears of the loop and surgery bear him out. Instead, he vigorously favors a "cafeteria approach," giving Indians the widest choice of birth control techniques. "We'll try everything from the Y.M.C.A. method (coldwater baths) to the pill," he says. But in his campaign to cut India's birth rate from 40 per 1,000 annually to 25 or even 20 per 1,000 in a decade, Chandrasekhar will also emphasize the rubber contraceptive.

With American aid, India recently bought 22 million condoms from Japan, and expects to buy another 50 million from the U.S. It is also constructing a plant in Kerala that will produce 270 million contraceptives a year by 1970. To make sure that all Indians get the message, the government will launch a nationwide "use condoms" advertising campaign. Making a pitch for the lucrative contract is another capitalistic enterprise--the U.S.'s J. Walter Thompson Co. (see U.S. BUSINESS). Explained one family-planning official: "We want the condom to be as well advertised as Coca-Cola."

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