Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Rockefeller Foundation Support to the Khanna Study: Population Policy and the Construction of Demographic Knowledge, 1945-1953

January 1, 2011

In the years that followed Indian independence from British Colonial rule, occurring in 1947, the people of India experienced unprecedented attempts to limit their numbers. In 1952, as the government of India began what was a 'pioneering' project of state-sponsored family planning, as part of the program of national development in its First Five Year Plan, advisors and funds flowed from abroad to encourage, augment, and supplement the program. I visited the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in 2010 as part of my Ph.D. research, in which I examine the history of population control in post-colonial India. At that point, my project looked widely at this history, guided by two broad research questions: why did population control become such an important project within the newly independent Indian nation, and why did India occupy such a central position within global 'overpopulation' discourse and related population control interventions? However, two weeks of research barely scratched the surface of the materials held at the RAC, where information on Indian population control spanned the records of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), the Rockefeller Family, and the Population Council (PC).

The Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, and Indian Population Control

January 1, 2010

In the second half of the twentieth century, 'overpopulation' became a key area of concern for a number of government and non-government organizations across the globe, and family planning aid was mobilized to meet the challenge of population growth by lowering the birth rate. Whilst concern surrounded population growth across the developing world, India held pride of place within global overpopulation discourse, bestowed by both foreign and Indian observers alike with the dubious honor of being 'the quintessentially overpopulated country' or the 'locus classicus of the Malthusian dilemma.' The newly independent Government of India became a pioneer in population control policy, launching the world's first government-sponsored family planning program in 1952. The Indian family planning program was expanded and intensified throughout the 1960s, and reached an infamous peak during Indira Gandhi's period of Emergency rule in 1975-77, when mass sterilization camps were teamed with increased incentives for vasectomies and tubectomies, and penalties for those who failed to limit the size of their families.

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