Quick snip and you might win a car

The population of India is expected to top 1.5 billion by 2050. Photo / Thinkstock

For Devinder and Rehka Kumar, two was enough.

After the birth of their second child - a boy - they realised they could not afford any more. The fact that they would receive a cash payment and even be given the chance to win a shiny new car if they actually did something about it only cemented their decision.

So this month the 24-year-old Ms Kumar found herself among a small group of women and one man in their Rajasthani town who took up the offer of a free sterilisation operation to ensure their families got no larger. On its completion, each was given a coupon for a forthcoming raffle, with prizes including a Tata Nano car, motorbikes and electric food blenders.

"I don't want any more children. It would be a burden to raise more children," a dazed Ms Kumar said after she blearily emerged from surgery. "I decided to have this done to make it easier."

India's population is huge and growing. The UN estimates that by 2050 it will have overtaken that of China and risen from its current 1.2 billion to more than 1.5 billion.

But the country's efforts at confronting the issue have had mixed and often deeply controversial results. In the 1970s, Sanjay Gandhi, son of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, oversaw a programme enacted during the State of Emergency in which unknown numbers of women were forced to be sterilised and men made to have vasectomies.

Despite the turmoil and bad publicity created by his programme, today in many communities in India, especially in poorer, rural areas, sterilisation remains the preferred, and often only, form of contraception.

Technically, paying people to undergo the operations is illegal. But the Ministry of Health has established a scheme that pays those who have the procedure for "loss of earnings". A man receives 1100 rupees ($29) while a woman pockets 600.

Anyone who brings willing patients to the clinic - a so-called "motivator" - pockets 200 rupees.

- INDEPENDENT