It is a pity that for every cause for celebration in India there is a corresponding reason to despair. The government's family planning initiatives seem to have paid off - according to the World Bank, the growth rate of India's population has been halved in the last 40 years. However, women seem to have been at the receiving end of the government's zeal to control the population. Data from a recent report by the health ministry on family planning schemes reveal that women constitute 98 per cent of those sterilized. Of the total 41,41,502 sterilizations done in India in 2015-16, 40,61,462 were tubectomies. And this is in spite of the fact that vasectomy, the related surgical procedure for men, is simpler. Indian men are still ruled by the specious fear that a vasectomy would reduce their virility. With a shortage of male health workers to dispel the myth and a society that overvalues male sexual prowess, men have consistently been 'protected' from the government's sterilization drives. Women, as usual, have paid the price. Several women die of tubectomies gone wrong; not much has changed since 2014 when some 15 women lost their lives after developing complications in a government-sponsored sterilization camp, which was held in an abandoned private hospital at Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh. Sometimes, the tubectomies prove to be ineffective and the women have to undergo abortions.

It is in this context that the Supreme Court recently ruled that the government must discontinue with sterilization camps in the course of the next three years. These camps, indeed, are a matter of shame, given the way they line up women - especially poor, illiterate women - like animals and perform hasty surgeries on them without taking their consent in most cases. Why should invasive procedures be the preferred method of population control? If the government had any intention of honouring women's reproductive rights it would have instructed health workers to make women aware of both surgical and non-surgical contraceptive choices available to them. When the healthcare system is in a shambles, sterilization should be resorted to only if all other means of population control fail. In a country where men are reputed to call the shots, they should take the responsibility for contraception as well, to prove their decision-making skills.