Educating women helps: Nitish on law for population control

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar Monday said that legislation may not work towards population control but the state’s experience indicated that educating women worked to bring down the rate of reproduction.

Nitish was responding to media queries at Janata Durbar which resumed after five-and-a-half years — the government had been facing the Opposition’s criticism for not interacting with people, especially during the pandemic. The CM said he will now meet people on three Mondays every month.

Asked if it is time for national legislation on population control and some states have already started discussing it, Nitish said, “Any state is free to take any step it wants (to control population). What I have learnt from my own experience is that educating women helps a great deal in curbing population. We found that if the wife has cleared Class 10, the reproduction rate is about two per cent and if she has passed 10 plus two, the reproduction rate comes down to 1.7 per cent which is close to the national average.” He, however, said there will always be exceptions to this observation.

Citing the example of China, he said, “First they had one (child norm) and took it to two…But did it help? What will help is awareness…We hope by 2040, reproduction rate in Bihar would come to zero per cent.”

However, the CM refrained from commenting on the Supreme Court’s position on the uniform civil code.