Making welfare conditional is a stamp of coercion

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Making welfare conditional is a stamp of coercion

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• Goal of new policy: UP's new "Population Policy" wants the state's fertility rate to go from 2.7 to 2.1 by 2026, and a new law will be brought to achieve this transition (the state's law commission released an ominous plan days earlier!)
• Incentives and penalties: The draft law ["UP Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021"] seeks to provide incentives and disincentives pertaining to benefits and subsidies, to families. This is a clear culture of coercion, myth and wrong assumptions; worldwide experience has shown such laws always fail to be effective. What they indeed do is augment discrimination against the most vulnerable sections of society.
• Why do it: Claim made is that UP's ecological and economic resoures are not unlimited, and without controlling numbers, basic rights cannot be guaranteed (and birth control alone can give sustainable growth). 
• Promise made: public servants who adopt sterilization and two-child norm get benefits (two increments in services, subsidy for house, paid maternity /paternity leave, free health care for spouse). Now, the punishments: Have more than two children and lose all govt. welfare benefits, lose eligibility to apply for state govt. job, lose promotions, and lose right to contest local body elections!
• Government thinks differently: The Union Health Ministry told the Supreme Court in 2020 that improving public health and educational access gives better results in cutting down fertility, so why have new coercive laws at all? The Union govt. told SC that "any coercive methods to control population leads to demographic distortions", and confirmed India's commitments under the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action, 1994. The primary promise there was that nations will not force demographic targets but will guarantee right to reproductive freedom.
• Rights: Supreme Court of India has recognised this as an inalienable right in the "Suchita Srivastava & Anr vs Chandigarh Administration (2009)"; in various cases the SC has said that a woman's freedom to make reproductive decisions is part of Article 21's right to personal liberty  (reproductive choices can be used to procreate and to abstain from it as well - by the individual). Same ruling was endorsed by the 9-judge bench in Right to Privacy verdict 2017 (KS Puttaswamy vs Union of India). A person's autonomy over her body is an extension of her right to privacy. 
• Proportionality: Now like other rights, this is not a boundless right, but any restriction must be as per the 'doctrine of proportionality'. How does that work? (i) Restrictions must be placed legally, (ii) It must be based on a legitimate aim, (iii) It exists as other alternatives don't, which may be less intrusive, (iv) It must have a rational link with the aims of the law.

1. The new UP law makes welfare conditional and by definition, it is coercive (though the state will argue it is voluntary)
2. Right to access basic goods cannot be based on a person sacrificing bodily autonomy
3. So the new law is not fit as per the proportionality analysis (and less intrusive means are available)

• Dangers: New law will do other harmful things also - (a) the sex ratio is already skewed and it will be further so now, as desire for son(s) will rule the minds, (b) forced sterilisation camps will happen (which as per S.C. harm the minorities much more).
• Bad in law: In the case "Javed & Othr vs. State of Haryana & Ors (2003)", the SC itself upheld the Haryana law that disqualified persons with two or more kids from contesting local body elections (that was bad law), but the present UP Bill is far more deleterious (literally civil death for violators). It's time for S.C. to apply the Puttaswamy judgment fully, for it to have any lasting, concrete meaning.

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