This policy limits family size, encourages late marriage and childbearing, and the spacing of children when second children are permitted. Family planning committees at local levels develop local strategies. The one-child rule applies only to urban residents and government employees. In rural areas, a second child is allowed after five years, if the first is a girl. A third child is sanctioned in some ethnic minorities and in remote, under-populated areas. Economic incentives for compliance, substantial fines, confiscation of property and loss of job, etc. are used to enforce the policy.
The policy is based on universal access to contraception and abortion. Eighty-seven per cent of all married women use contraception. (Ninety per cent of them use sterilisations.) Most women accept the method recommended by the family planning worker. Reliance on long-term contraception keeps the abortion rate low (25 per cent of Chinese women of reproductive age have had at least one abortion, as compared with 43 per cent in the United States). Abortions are sanctioned when contraceptives fail or when the pregnancy is not approved.
Impact on population growth
The fertility rate (mean number of children/woman) decreased from 2.9 in 1979 to 1.7 in 2004 (1.3 in urban areas, <2.0 in rural areas). This has resulted in urban families with predominantly one child and rural families with predominantly two children.
However, the fertility rate had already decreased from 5.9 in 1970 to 2.1 in 1979 under the voluntary "late, long, few" policy of postponed childbearing, greater spacing between children, and fewer children. With the implementation of the one-child policy, there was a further fall to 1.7 by 1995.
India’s population policy
Population growth has long been a concern of the government, and India has a lengthy history of explicit population policy. In the 1950s, the government began, in a modest way, one of the earliest national, government-sponsored family planning efforts in the developing world. The annual population growth rate in the previous decade (1941 to 1951) had been below 1.3 percent, and government planners optimistically believed that the population would continue to grow at roughly the same rate.
National Population Policy pursues to achieve following Socio-Demographic goals by 2010:
- Address the unmet needs for basic reproductive and child health services, supplies and infrastructure.
- Make school education up to age 14 free and compulsory, and reduce drop outs at primary and secondary school levels to below 20 percent for both boys and girls.
- Reduce infant mortality rate to below 30 per 1000 live births.
- Reduce maternal mortality ratio to below 100 per 100,000 live births.
- Achieve universal immunization of children against all vaccine preventable diseases.
- Promote delayed marriage for girls, not earlier than age 18 and preferably after 20 years of age.
- Achieve 80 percent institutional deliveries and 100 percent deliveries by trained persons.
- Achieve universal access to information/counselling, and services for fertility regulation and contraception with a wide basket of choices.
- Achieve 100 per cent registration of births, deaths, marriage and pregnancy.
- Contain the spread of sexual viruses and diseases.
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Comparison of the two countries India and china.
