‘Let men pop a pill too’

The Centre has been asked by committee on empowerment of women to take up research on male contraceptive pill on priority basis under the Family Planning Division, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 30, 2008, 01:20:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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There should be a contraceptive pill for men to ensure gender parity in family control measures, a parliamentary panel has told the government.

The committee on empowerment of women has asked the Centre to take up research on male contraceptive pill on priority basis under the Family Planning Division. Participation of men in family planning has been found to be very less. The committee, headed by Krishna Tirath, tabled the report in Parliament on Tuesday.

The recommendation is a fall-out of the government’s data indicating that most family planning programmes are women-centric. “From the data available before them, the committee found that over a period of time the entire contraception programme of the government has become women-centric and male sterilization has been put on the back burner,” the committee said.

The health ministry informed the committee that of the permanent contraception, a whopping 97.5 per cent was tubectomies, a popular method of female sterilization. The figures would tell you the lopsidedness of the family planning programmes with over 44 lakh women undergoing tubectomies in 2006-07 as against just 1.14 lakh men opting for vasectomy.

The panel blamed the government for the situation, as in most of the contraception drives, men are not targeted.

The committee also felt that one of the easiest method of male contraception, non-scalpel vasectomy, was not being preferred because of myths and misconceptions associated with it. “Because of this our male dominated society increasingly puts pressure on women to take care of birth control on their own,” the report said.

In the wake of these findings, the committee has asked the government to give incentives to men to opt for male sterilization. And, one method suggested was providing insurance cover to men who opt for vasectomy. The committee has also asked the government to strengthen communication support to such initiatives through mass media campaigns to remove fears regarding vasectomy among men.

Even today, contraception methods adopted by women account for over 84 per cent of total birth control measures, including contraceptive pills. For men, condom usage remains as low as eight per cent whereas more and more men are opting of the risky method of withdrawal.

The health ministry has informed the committee that Hindustan Latex Limited, a public sector company, has developed a new easy to use kit to detect pregnancy at an early stage. The kit would be distributed to women under different government programmes soon, the ministry said.

To control maternal mortality, the committee has recommended that the state governments should conduct maternal audits, a detailed maternal death inquiry system.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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