Repositioning family planning as a health and development issue can lead to designing programs that address women’ s reproductive health needs along with family planning.
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continues to be viewed as population control, however, these are two very different concepts. Organizations such as ours, strive towards advancing reproductive rights and choice for women and men. To achieve this, multiple stakeholders, including NGOs and corporates need to work along with the Government. NGOs can play a significant role by: i) increasing public and political participation in family planning and contraception, ii) creating awareness on the need for family planning iii) advocating for an increased basket of choice and increased budget iv) by ensuring a rights based approach in family planning policy and programmes in the country.
How closer do you think India is to the FP2020 commitments and overall SDGs?
With four years remaining to meet the FP2020 goal of reaching 48 million additional users, the FP2020 platform is helping countries and partners to accelerate progress. The work of the family planning community is having a positive impact. While India is currently finalizing the analysis of the NFHS-IV, and when available, the national and state-level data will provide an opportunity to assess the country’ s progress. However, it is encouraging that the Indian Government is reviewing its existing programs and taking measures to provide a wider range of short-term and long-term acting contraceptive methods, including the introduction of injectables, centchroman and Progestin-Only Pills( POP) in the public health system. India is also focusing on expanding investment in postpartum family planning and working towards
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Repositioning family planning as a health and development issue can lead to designing programs that address women’ s reproductive health needs along with family planning.
improving the quality of family planning services.
The Millennium Development Goals( MDGs) have successfully engaged and sustained governments as well as citizens’ participation for mobilizing resources to increase accountability in many developing countries including India. The Sustainable Development Goals( SDGs) were launched recently and India is increasingly paying attention to developing programs to fulfill the SDGs. It is too early to assess the outcome.
What kind of future do you visualize for the Indian Family Planning Program?
The recent Supreme Court judgment in the Devika Biswas v / s Union of India case has the potential to engaged and take forward India’ s Family Planning goals. The judgment has three clear directives- one, it calls for ending the practice of holding sterilization camps within the next three years. Two, the judgment calls upon State Governments and Union Territories to ensure that family planning targets are not fixed- so that health workers do not follow what would amount to forced or non-consensual sterilization merely to achieve the targets.
Three, the judgment makes a number of concrete recommendations for improving the implementation of family planning programmes. This judgment, if implemented effectively, has enormous potential for changing India’ s Family planning landscape.
Though, 24 Indian states have already achieved replacement level fertility. But, a decrease in fertility rate has not resulted in improved maternal health given the practice of early marriage, early childbearing and closely spaced births. Repositioning family planning as a health and development issue can lead to designing programs that address women’ s reproductive health needs along with family planning.
India’ s Family Planning program should not be a vertical program but view women’ s sexual and reproductive health within a comprehensive approach. There is a need for convergence with other programs such as literacy, socioeconomic status, women’ s empowerment, reproductive and sexual health as well as other development indicators.
Working with young people is critical for India to make the most of its demographic advantage of having a young population. The need for effective family planning has never been greater than it is today as the largest group of people in Indian history move through their reproductive stage. Another important aspect that I would wish for India’ s Family Planning programme is to encompass men, adolescents, youth and unmarried couples into its folds. However, it is implicit that to be able to do this we would require an increased budget.
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BioVoiceNews | December 2016- January 2017