Background
- The Government of India launched the National Population Policy in 2000 to improve quality of lives of people of India and to provide them with equal opportunities to be productive individuals of society.
- India launched its first programme to emphasize the need for family planning in 1952 and became the first country in the world to do so.
- The government realised that the latter is basically a function of making reproductive health care accessible and affordable for all, providing primary and secondary education, etc.
- All this is also essential for creating a sustainable development model.
About National Population Policy (NPP-2000)
- 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 per cent institutional deliveries and 100 percent deliveries by trained persons.
- Achieve universal access to information/ counseling, and services for fertility regularisation 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 infection (RTI) and sexually transmitted infection (STI) and the National AIDS Control Organisation.
- Prevent and control communicable diseases.
- Integrate Indian System of Medicine (ISM) in the provision of reproductive and child health services, and in reaching out to households.
- Promote vigorously the small family norms to achieve replacement levels of TFR.
- Bring about convergence in implementation of related social sector programs so that family welfare becomes a people centred program.
Source: indiabudget.gov.in
