Box 2: National Socio-Demographic Goals for 2010

• Address the unmet needs for basic reproductive and child health services, supplies and infrastructure.
• Make school education up to age 14 free and compulsory, and reduce drop outs at primary and secondary school levels to below 20 percent for both boys and girls.
• Reduce infant mortality rate to below 30 per 1000 live births.
• Reduce maternal mortality ratio to below 100 per 100,000 live births.
• Achieve universal immunization of children against all vaccine preventable diseases.
• Promote delayed marriage for girls, not earlier than age 18 and preferably after 20 years of age.
• Achieve 80 percent institutional deliveries and 100 percent deliveries by trained persons.
• Achieve universal access to information/counseling, and services for fertility regulation and contraception with a wide basket of choices.
• Achieve 100 per cent registration of births, deaths, marriage and pregnancy.
• Contain the spread of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), and promote greater integration between the management of reproductive tract infections (RTI) and sexually transmitted infections (STI) and the National AIDS Control Organisation.
• Prevent and control communicable diseases.
• Integrate Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) in the provision of reproductive and child health services, and in reaching out to households.
• Promote vigorously the small family norm to achieve replacement levels of TFR.
• Bring about convergence in implementation of related social sector programs so that family welfare becomes a people centred programme.

If the NPP 2000 is fully implemented, we anticipate a population of 1107 million (110 crores) in 2010, instead of 1162 million (116 crores) projected by the Technical Group on Population Projections:

• The large size of the population in the reproductive age-group (estimated contribution 58 percent). An addition of 417.2 million between 1991 and 2016 is anticipated despite substantial reductions in family size in several states, including those which have already achieved replacement levels of TFR. This momentum of increase in population will continue for some more years because high TFRs in the past have resulted in a large proportion of the population being currently in their reproductive years. It is imperative that the the reproductive age group adopts without further delay or exception the "small family norm", for the reason that about 45 percent of population increase is contributed by births above two children per family.

• Higher fertility due to unmet need for contraception (estimated contribution 20 percent). India has 168 million eligible couples, of which just 44 percent are currently effectively protected. Urgent steps are currently required to make contraception more widely available, accessible, and affordable. Around 74 percent of the population lives in rural areas, in about 5.5 lakh villages, many with poor communications and transport. Reproductive health and basic health infrastructure and services often do not reach the villages, and, accordingly, vast numbers of people cannot avail of these services.

• High wanted fertility due to the high infant mortality rate (IMR) (estimated contribution about 20 percent). Repeated child births are seen as an insurance against multiple infant (and child) deaths and accordingly, high infant mortality stymies all efforts at reducing TFR.

• Over 50 percent of girls marry below the age of 18, the minimum legal age of marriage, resulting in a typical reproductive pattern of "too early, too frequent, too many". Around 33 percent births occur at intervals of less than 24 months, which also results in high IMR.