The Target-Free Approach: An Overview

Abstract

India has the distinction of being the first country in the developing world to initiate a family planning programme-it later came to be called the Family Welfare Programme (FWP)-with a view to bring down the country's fertility level and contain population growth. Fertility levels have come down throughout the country, albeit at varying paces in different regions. In the country as a whole, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime, declined from about six in the early 1970s to 3.4 in the mid-1990s. Yet, the population has continued to grow at or around 2 per cent per annuin since the 1960s, such that, it has more than doubled from 439 million in 1961 to an estimated 930 million in 1996, and will be well over 1.5
billion before it eventually gets stabilised (Visaria et al. 1999). At this pace, India is likely to become the most populous nation by 2035 (Bose 1996). Apart from the population problem, quality of care and reproductive health are other issues which also pose a challenge to the Indian FWP.