The Balloons Of National Family Planning Programme

India is a land of quality paper work. We have the largest written Constitution, we construct fantastic buildings, roads and bridges with crores of rupees on paper, sometimes we even produce imaginary population on paper. Papers here can eat grains, kerosene, concrete, cement and what not. We have many development policies and programmes, which look great on paper. The principles and fundamentals which our policy makers use to frame these policies are the ideal, but most of these policies fail or under achieve because of the implementation techniques. If some theory exam is organised on ideal policy making, India will surely top in that. The programmes on Health and Family Welfare, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, MNREGA, MDM ,Reservation policy and many others have seen inappropriate or sluggish implementaion. Anyways this post is for the National Family Planning Programme.

I am doing a course on Demography this semester. One day while discussing the fertility aspects and birth control our Professor told us about the family planning programme in India and its success and failures. It was a proud feeling to know that India was one of the first countries to implement a nationalised family planning programme. There were advertisements on radio promoting use of condoms, sterilisation and other birth control techniques, big posters of “chhota parivar- sukhi parivar” were put on roads and public places. Policy makers thought that these written banners will motivate the massively uneducated population of India. People were given gifts, monetary benefits and incentives if they agreed to get sterilised. The condoms and other things were distributed for free. And on the results part of this policy there were lakhs of sterilisations- most of those were of people of age above 40(when they already had 3 to 4 children) and many on paper only. Women were forced to get sterilised, even when the operation involved was comparatively very easy for men. Even the people living in villages had the availability of condoms, but no one knew how to use them. On a conclusion note our Prof made a statement- “ In the 70’s and 80’s if you go to some village you can easily find children playing with the condom balloons”. Whole class burst in laughter on this but it was like “WHAT….???” for me, because I remembered something.

This discussion made me reel back my life to 1998-99. During the school vacations we used to go to our village. In the village I used to forget all the adequates and language which the Christian Convent School taught me and become one of them. I played and mixed with all kinds of children there, some wearing dirty clothes, some wearing only pants or underwears, some having nose running out. Everyday I got an ultimatum from my mother- “agar agli bar in gande baccho ke sath khelte dikhe to taange tod dungi”. But I went daily because they had really interesting games. One of the games which was very popular those days was playing with balloons. These balloons were really cheap- you can get around 10 in 1 rupee, some children even got them for free, I used to wonder from where they get it. Inspite of being so cheap their size was very big as compared to the normal balloons. They had a peculiar characteristic- they exploded if they fell on grass or even touched it. I remember I spent a lot of time in trying to discover why only these balloons explode on falling on the grass, while the normal ones don’t. Anyways this led to a discovery of another interesting game for us- balloon volleyball. We played voleyball kind of game with them, the one who missed his shot, his balloon fell on the grass and exploded. We even celebrated one of our friends birthday with those balloons. I used to do all this non-sense far away from the reach of my home so that my family members specially my father doesn’t see me playing with those kids. One day by mistake I reached home with one such balloon in my hand and unfortunately met my father on the gate itself. He scolded me heavily and forbade me not to step out from the house for 2 days as a punishment. At that time I couldn’t figure out why he scolded me so much for just playing with a balloon. I asked this from my mummy and even she showered all her anger on me. I came to know the reason of that punishment after these many years in class that day. But I still don’t know why those balloons exploded on touching the grass. :P 

Anyways if someone asks me now –“Have you ever bought a condom?, I can proudly say- “Condoms, I used to play with them in my childhood man.” :P :P