By Bhuvan BAGGA Agence France-Presse DARBHANGA, India (AFP) — Married off by her parents at 14, Indian mother-of-seven Jaimala Devi kept having children because her husband insisted she could only stop once she had given birth to two sons. Devi’s story is common across Bihar, the poorest state in the world’s most populous country and also its fastest-growing: with around 127 million people, it already has roughly as many people as Mexico. India’s overall birthrate […]
Tag: India population
Family planning in India: A woman’s burden
Bhoodbaral, India (AFP) by Aishwarya KUMAR Occasional screams sounded from the operating theatre in a rural Indian clinic as a heavily sedated woman named Kajal waited to have her tubes tied, long the country’s preferred family planning method. “The anaesthesia must not have kicked in,” one healthcare worker said outside the facility in the northern village of Bhoodbaral, where a line of women in colourful headscarves waited to undergo the 50-minute procedure, which in India’s […]





