Coming down heavily on the Centre's Population Policy, various Non Governmental Organisations today demanded abolition of the two-child norm and sought better health care services to control population explosion.

"The draft strategy paper to control population growth in the country being circulated in high fertility districts clearly violates the spirit of the target free approach on the International Conference on Population and Development convention (ICPD)," Jasodhara Dasgupta of Healthwatch UP-Bihar told reporters here today.

Deploring the process of identifying 150 "high fertility districts" across the country and implementation of target oriented population control programme in those areas, she said "the measures taken in those programmes violate even the basic rights of a citizen." Under the two child norm, health officials are adopting coercive measures to meet the target of sterilizations which leave an adverse impact on women's health, she claimed.

"In a country where women do not have any say in child birth, the two child norm is being used as a tool to penalise innocent women for no fault of theirs," she said.

Citing the example of China, where the Government had imposed the single child norm, Meenu Wadhera of the 'Hunger Project' said the country was facing a crisis as the preference for a male child had led to scarcity of women.

Instead of imposing the two-child norm, the government should focus on providing better health care services to reduce maternal and infant mortality as this would automatically check the population growth, they said. PTI