Question

Write short notes

1. Family planning programme

2. Population explosion

Answer 1

1. Family planning program was initiated by the government of India in 1952, in order to control the rising population in the country. This program emphasised on having a small family and controlling the size of a family through the use of contraceptives and spacing between the births. In the initial years of this program, mass media like radio and television were used to spread the idea and benefits of small family size. With the course of time, the program was launched across the country. In order to promote this, family planning centres were opened to provide counselling and contraceptives to people for free of cost. However, this program was not successful due to many factors. Some of them being, lack of awareness among the people about family planning, traditional and religious beliefs of the people and inconsistent implementation of the government policies. Thus, all these resulted in the failure of the family planning programme.

2. Population explosion refers to the sudden and high increase in the growth of human population wherein the growth rate of population is higher than the rate of growth and development of a country. The basic reason that results in the population explosion is an increase in the survival rate. Here, survival rate can be defined as the difference between the birth rate and the death rate. With slowly falling birth rate and a highly declining death rate, the survival rate increases rapidly which in turn results in an increase in the total population of a country. Hence, resulting in population explosion.