ABSTRACT
Ever since the end of the eighteenth century, population issues have cast a shadow across debates about how more equitable and sustainable social change might be encouraged. When Malthus disputed with Condorcet, Godwin and others about the relationships between population growth, the growth in agricultural output, and the mechanisms through which these might be related, he was contributing to lively debates in political economy, debates that were crucial in the foundation of modern economics (Sen, 1996). Since the Second World War, as economic development programmes have become central features of national and international projects, population issues have rarely been far below the surface. But only since the early 1970s have these issues been explicitly addressed in terms of their gender and class implications. The major decennial international population conferences - in Bucharest in 1974, in Mexico City in 1984 and, most recently, in Cairo in 1994 - provide invaluable windows into current arguments about how population issues should be understood. Each conference exposed different fault lines. Each is remembered for different messages - about the priority that should be attached to population growth compared to (say) the international and national redistribution of resources or to women’s empowerment programmes - though these messages may bear little relationship to everyday policy. Thus, 1974 is linked to the statement by Karan Singh, the Indian Minister for Health and Family Planning, that ‘Development is the best contraceptive.’ Yet within two years he was party to one of the most coercive attempts to use population control to assist in Indian development by forcibly sterilising more than 10 million Indians during the political Emergency.
