"Population in India's development,1947-2000

The Indian Association for the Study of Population (IASP) was guided by three major considerations in commissioning this major project for the World Population Year (1974). First and foremost was the academic need for countering the growing tendency of equating population studies with investigations centred on family planning, with an inordinate emphasis on KAP studies. As long back as 1966 the President of IASP in his convocation address to the International Institute for Population Studies at Bombay had deplored the implications of this trend. Several factors had over a number of years contributed to this unhappy state of affairs. The training and research conducted in the West very often seeks to emphasize specialization in formal demography insofar as it relates to induced changes in the rate of population growth at the cost of other aspects of population studies. In many developing countries, the growing anxiety on the part of planners and administrators to make a quick impact on the birth rate has often degenerated into a preoccupation with family planning as an end in itself. Along with this phenomenon, there has been a spectacular rise in the financial allocations for family planning programmes as an increasing fraction of developmental aid from rich to poor nations.