<<Previous Page Next Page>>   QUESTION: I will read the next question exactly as it is worded. Dear Rajiv bhaiyya, we wish you all good luck for bringing India up. Tell us what we can do and how we can participate in that work? PRIME MINISTER: I thought I just answered that! QUESTION: What do you feel to be your major challenge as Prime Minister of India? PRIME MINISTER: Well there are many challenges in every field. Every developing country has these challenges, every developed country has these challenges, but if you want to point out one particular place where we have to put all our energies, I think it would be population control. This is, I think, the key to India's development, the key to India's survival ultimately. And we are looking at how to tackle this particular area. We are spending very large sums of money on traditional methods of population control, traditional propaganda, traditional contraceptives and other things. And we are finding that especially in the last few years although the birth rate is coming down-it is now approximately 1.8% which is the lowest we have ever had, and we are proud of this-the returns that we are getting for investments are not proportional. We have to think of how we can tackle this better. One thing we have found is wherever there is good education, the birth rate is immediately dropping, especially women's education, and we are going to concentrate very much on education and women's education to see that this takes place properly, is adequate and is broad-based enough. We also have to see that there is adequate health care for children and for mothers. The birth rate also comes down where women are allowed to rise up in society. So these are areas which we are going to concentrate on. In fact, in the Seventh Plan, the large jump in the size of the Plan of over two thousand crores has been put only into these three or four areas. And we hope that we will be able to show very good results in this. But this is an area where there is a tremendous time lag before any results actually start appearing, but we are optimistic. Address to the Indian Community in Houston, 15 June 1985 <<Previous Page Next Page>>