What better proves the absolute powerlessness and political insignificance of children than the fact that only 27% of them have birth certificates? The rest do not exist for the country. Why is the situation so dismal? Perhaps the registration of births will hamper the killing of the girl-child. I am not talking of female feticides but female infanticides.

Well, we discuss the reasons in the following way:

1) Selling of babies will be more difficult. Unscrupulous people often buy off babies, both boys and girls, to sell them to different organized crime-cartels. For example, there are the organized beggars of Mumbai. The bought babies are crippled and have to beg money for their masters.

2) Registering births will show rising and uncontrolled demographics. This may force the hauling up of key government officials in charge of population control. So, it is due to the vested interests of some that we do not know the real number of births.

3) India is getting more and more polarized - castes, religion and subsets of these are very important to all Indians. Communities’ job prospects today are largely dependant on class-politics. In this context, it is very important to have records of births. This will help policy-makers to tweak existing policies to keep up with the changing social scenario. This again will be hated by some politically vested interests.

4) Lastly, not registering births leads to later problems with proving Indian citizenship. And eventually this helps politicians to manipulate vote-demographics and pander to only those who matter. Here we better understand that the poor have lesser birth-registrations than the rich in India.

All the above conclusions are based on the National Family Health Survey III, conducted during 2005-06. The Times of India reports that this survey was done in 29 states by 18 institutes. It is just another statistical tome which successfully hides all that needs to be told. For example, it tells us what we always had a gut-feeling about.

Hinterland India comprising of UP, Rajasthan and Jharkhand have low birth-rate registration. Goa and Kerala have some of the highest rates of birth-registration in India. There are hackneyed comments about the direct relations of birth-registrations and education. In fact the report makes all the right noises. It has been praised from all the right sources as being in tandem with the National Population Policy 2000. In a few days time all except the compilers will forget it. Except in babudom where promotions are at stake, otherwise none takes these reports seriously.

Via: Times of India

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