From the Executive Director
Repositioning Family Planning: From Challenges to Opportunities
It is with pleasure that I present our new website. I joined the Population Foundation of India in September 2010 after being with the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation for over 15 years as Country Director. I am fortunate to enter at a time when PFI is well established and gearing up to scale new heights.
Forty years have seen PFI gain many accolades as it grew from a few people to over a hundred. Programmes evolved from a narrow approach to population issues to a broader focus on reproductive health in keeping with the changing times.
However, a key challenge now is to reposition family planning within the broader framework of reproductive health and primary health. While this has been the rhetoric in the new paradigm post ICPD, in actual implementation, family planning still continues to be administered as a vertical programme.
Additionally, with the advent of the 2011 Census, lurks the fear of the spotlight returning to numbers and targets with little or no concern for people themselves. The challenge will be to retain the focus on people’s needs and ensure that both policy and programmes are people friendly, gender sensitive and rights based.
On the positive side, the policy environment presents many opportunities too. The Government of India recognises the need for repositioning family planning in the context of maternal and child health and has renewed efforts to do so. The communitisation process, as mandated under the Rural Health Mission, has also been initiated in many states as has the process of planning from village upwards based on community needs assessment.
The meeting of the National Commission on Population held in October 2010 under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to bring population stabilisation back on the agenda. The Chair emphasised that population stabilisation needs to be accorded high priority and brought back into political discourse at all levels. The proceedings highlight the need to develop a family planning strategy that focuses on delaying age at marriage, delaying birth of the first child and promoting birth spacing.
PFI is gearing up to new opportunities and challenges. A rigorous strategic planning exercise has been initiated with key stakeholders to converge on ideas and strategies for repositioning family planning. PFI’s role and areas of primary focus are also being charted and redefined. Furthermore, PFI has undertaken an organisational transformation exercise to align itself to the call of the hour.
Poonam Muttreja
