Suffer little children.

You drive to the local rubbish tip to throw your household rubbish. As you deposit your plastic bag containing rotting food, vegetable peels and discarded cartons and get back to your car 5 or 6 little children climb into the tip and tear up the bag to see what bits they can sell for recycling. They are filthy with dirty faces, matted hair and yet laughing with each other as they rumage through the stinking rubbish. You are filled with an impotent rage and guilt at their suffering while driving away in your clean car. Nothing you can do. There are just too many and the numbers are increasing. In an article titled The Economic Consequences of Reproductive Health and Family Planning in The Lancet of 14 July, David Canning and T Paul Schultz cite an experiment in Matlab district of Bangladesh between 1977 and 1996 when 71 of 141 villages were targeted by a family planning outreach program. Before the program began all villages had similar fertility, that is child to woman ratios, average schooling and housing characteristics. 19 years after the program began child-to-woman ratios were 16% lower in villages with an outreach program than the others. In the outreach villages Body Mass Index of women aged 25-54 years was 1 kg/sq m higher with a 17% decrease in mortality. Married women in program villages reported a 25% increase in physical assets per adult in their households. The quality of assets had also improved. Instead of livestock, which depends on child labor, program villages had housing and financial assets, consumer durables  and jewellery. In the same issue of The Lancet Pierre Damien Habumuremyi, Prime Minister of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi, late Prime Minister of Ethiopia wrote a comment titled Making Family Planning a National Development Priority in which they write," We believe that every person should have the right and an equitable opportunity to live a healthy, productive and fulfilling life." Family planning helps to improve the health of children and women and helps women to participate in the economic activity " enabling families to invest more in education of their children ".In Rwanda the percentage of married women using contraception has risen from 13% in 2000 to 52% in 2010 while in Ethiopia it has risen from 8% to 29%. They write," We believe that improving education and improving access to family planning are not alternatives: they are rather complementary policies that African governments and the international  community must pursue." While these enlightened leaders in Africa are spending on family planning our government is spending vast amounts on encouraging more children by handing out money based on Aadhar numbers. They call it a " game changer ". What game is it going to change? To help the Congress bribe its way to another election victory. On the suffering of children.