Tannuka Juneja
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Center on a Public Interest plea (PIL), ordering the Center to give effective guidelines to check population explosion and restrict families to two children if they wanted to avail benefits including government jobs and shelter.
Seeking the Centre’s response, a bench of Justice Aniruddha Bose and Justice Vikram Nath tagged the plea along with pending matters relating to the same issue.
This order of the High Court has come 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 High Court had sought a response from the Center on the complaints of Devkinandan Thakur, advocate Ashwini Upadhyay and others on the same issue.
In his petition, Ahmed said that population explosion is the main cause of more than 50 per cent of India’s problems. 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, the petitioner requested the Law Commission of India to prepare a comprehensive report on the population explosion within three months and suggest ways to control it.
The Center had earlier told the High Court that India was against forcing its people into family planning and that any requirement to have a certain number of children is counterproductive and leads to demographic distortions.
