CHECK MATE: India's Family Planning Programme 

Excellent video, covers the major issues quite well. Family planning program is essential to help set the groundwork for a healthy nation in the future by ensuring children are born to healthy families with resources to provide for their competitive future. This is especially true for a developing nation. There will always be naysayers but must keep confident and do our best. While the goal of family planning are noble to improve quality of life and opportunities offered to future generations, I believe in India it has not been applied consistently and on a scale sufficient to effect the necessary change, and secondly, as the video points out, there are some obvious flaws to address; in particular that it is the poor beyond their reproductive years that opt for sterilization, after they've already had their children. Lastly, family planning is voluntary in India. Poor often feel they haven't the incentive to pursue sterilization because large family is the only sort of social security they've got. Family planning may always be essential but so is providing resources for the poor to provide for their needs without large family. These investments must take place in tandem. Lastly we must work on using education and media to reform culture that stigmatizes family planning and sterilization as a sin or a sign of lack of virility to choose to have a smaller family. Perhaps it would be helpful to pursue medically reversible methods of sterilization for men and women weary of losing their children and being without the ability to conceive.

The time has come to launch a new war against population ... better a low fertility rate of 1.5. - 1.6 children per woman (if it goes to Singaporean levels like 0.8 we can worry). It can solve many problems such as the water crisis, global warming, environmental degradation. It will lead to better education and boost family savings. Ageing is not such a major problem as imagined. Most countries have come up with plans to address ageing. Plus, people can save more. Anyway most parents won't depend on their children in old age in futire. Sujay Rao Mandavilli