78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
of small and medium size holdings. The farmer's attitude is "Why pav 2500 rupees for an extra hand. Why not have a son?35 Mamdani does not minimize the problem of fragmentation confronting the farmer. According to him the farmer views it as a problem of the next generation. His major problem is to make a living off the land in his own lifetime. The production cost is his real problem. Harijans also find it advantageous to have a large family to meet the demand for additional labour required during the busy season and to earn a little more for the lean period. Really people who want a small-size family are teachers, government workers and ex-moneylenders, who constitute hardly five per cent of the population. What Mamdani's study has tried to show is that it is "utopain to suggest that the private cost-benefit considerations can coincide with the social cost-benefit optimality." Mamdani's study confirms Dr Desh-mukh's calling our family planning programmes, in the absence of basic information "a guessing game, with high stakes, played with blunt clubs in a dark room full of players.^
Vasectomy Festivals
The Crucifixion of the Unborn is delightful reading. Jagannatha Panicker makes a rambling survey of resources, population growth and the views of eminent men to show that India is not overpopulated. The theory of overpopulation has a political overtone. Any discussion on that will only end in disagreement. But even those who cannot agree with him on the question of overpopulation will find it difficult to disagree with him when he says that India has failed to turn her vast manpower into a powerful instrument for economic expansion, because of her failure to bring about necessary structural and institutional changes. Will the 'milder form of democratic socialism^ which he mentions, hasten or slow down the "structural and institutional" changes ?
One can understand his disgust with the herding of poor and innocent people for vasectomy operation alluring them with cash awards and glittering prizes to the family planning camps, called also 'festivals9 by paid agents. But his arguments against it would have been more convincing if he made follow-up studies of a few cases showing the demographic and economic characteristics of those who submitted to the operation, their motivation and decision-making, after-effects of the operation on health, marital harmony, sex behaviour and also cases of repentence. Perhaps, finance must have been a constraint on him for undertaking such a study. The abundance of cheap gibes in the book will have only a reverse effect on the policy makers. The book contains an able presentation of the viewpoint of the Catholic Church on population and family planning in a foreword by the Archbishop ofTrivandrum, Benedict Mar
Gregorios.
RAMA VARMA