Supreme Court notice to Centre on a plea to control population explosion
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Centre on a public interest plea seeking directions to the Centre to frame effective guidelines to control the population explosion and restrict families to two children if they wanted to avail benefits including government jobs and shelter.
Seeking a response from the Centre, a bench comprising Justice Aniruddha Bose and Justice Vikram Nath tagged the plea along with pending matters relating to same issue.
The order of the top court came on a public interest plea by Firoz Bakht Ahmed, grandnephew of freedom fighter and country’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
Earlier, the top court had sought a response from the Centre on the pleas by Devkinandan Thakur, advocate Ashwini Upadhyay and others on a similar topic.
In his plea, Ahmed has stated that the population explosion was the root cause of more than 50 per cent of problems in India. The PIL sought directions to the Centre to ascertain the feasibility of making the 'Two-Child Law' as criteria for government jobs, aids and subsidies, right to vote, right to contest, right to property, right to free shelter, etc.
“The government should declare the first Sunday of every month as Health Day in place of Polio Day to spread awareness on population explosion and provide contraceptive pills, condoms, vaccines, etc to EWS and BPL families, with polio vaccines," said the plea by Ahmed.
As an alternative relief, the petitioner has sought directions from the Law Commission of India to prepare a comprehensive report on the population explosion within three months and suggest ways to control it.
The Centre had earlier told the top court that India is unequivocally against forcing family planning on its people and any coercion to have a certain number of children is counter-productive and leads to demographic distortions.
In its affidavit filed in the top court, the Union ministry of health and family welfare had told the top court that the family welfare programme was voluntary, which enabled couples to decide on the size of their family and adopt family planning methods best suited to them, without any compulsion.
