FAMILY PLANNING 41 accept vasectomy by offering them petty cash as bribe. This is doubly tragic because the same government, with all its oft-proclaimed dedication to democracy, human dignity, social justice and welfare of the poor and the dispossessed, has failed so miserably to do anything worthwhile to improve the lot of these unfortunate people all these twenty five years since independence. What moral, political and legal authority has such a government to inflict such a humiliation on the people whom it is supposed to serve ? The supreme nonchalance with which the government has used police methods—use of revenue staff—to procure vasectomy "acceptors" shows how refractory it could be to some basic norms of administrative behaviour. All these have a faint echo of the days of the Indigo Planters. Apart from these very profound moral, political and legal issues, the callous unconcern of the organisers for the well-being of the acceptors (as symbolised by their failure to ensure a minimum standard of surgical care, including follow-up surgical care to the acceptors) raises a profound ethical issue. And, finally, from a demographic angle, one has to assess how accurate has been the recording of the age of the acceptors and how many of them have v/ives who are past their reproductive age, and how many of them are widowers or have never married ?5 Cause of the Failures At first sight, such a long succession of failures of such large dimensions appear so very bewildering. How could the decision-makers "succeed" in committing so many blunders and how were they allowed to get away with them ? When, however, these lapses in decision-making are seen against the background of the political, social, economic and international forces that have given shape to the various development programmes in India since independence, they may not appear so bewildering. The Indian political leaders, who took over the government after independence, were the peace-setters of the process. Somehow, they persuaded themselves to believe that they can have it both ways. While they felt compelled to firmly commit themselves to building an egalitarian society by including such items as right to work, health, special care for the weaker sections of the community and free and compulsory education to all children upto the age of fourteen by I960, in the Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution, they were not prepared to effect the necessary social, political and administrative changes for attaining such goals. They wanted to win a modern war with bows and arrows. The political leaders presumed that the values of a highly privileged class which most of them had inherited from the colonial era will not come in the way of effecting social and economic revolution in the country. Nor did they think it absolutely essential to stand up to the pressures from the vested interests in urban and rural areas, for bringing about the revolution. Similarly, they also thought that they will usher in the revolution without facing the challenge of changing the structure