NEW DELHI, India — The phone rang at a call center in New Delhi one recent afternoon. When an agent picked up the receiver, a young woman whispered hesitantly. She said that she lived with her large extended family in a remote rural settlement and that nobody knew she was calling.
“I told her to be open and have no fear. She paused after every word,” recalled Payalkumari, 27, the call center agent, who uses only her first name. “Then she slowly opened up. She was newly married. She said her mother-in-law wanted her to have a child right away, but she was not ready to. She asked, ‘Is there some contraception that I can use secretly and nobody else will get to know in the family?’ ”
Payalkumari has taken hundreds of such calls since June, when India’s government-sponsored National Population Stabilization Fund opened a call center to provide reliable information about such socially taboo subjects as family planning, contraception and reproductive health — the first service of its kind in the country.
Cultural taboo
“In our culture, we cannot have open conversations about sensitive subjects like sex, contraception, abortion and pregnancy. People want answers, but who do they ask? Not parents, not teachers, not elders. They hesitate to go to the doctor. People are shy to even utter the word ‘condom’ at a pharmacy,” said the science graduate, who acknowledged that her family is like that as well. “But they can call here anonymously and ask any question. I give them all the information that they need. These are the people I need to convince for controlling India’s population growth.”
Every year, 24 million babies are added to India’s 1 billion-plus population, and estimates suggest that the country will overtake China as the world’s most populous by 2030.
Moreover, India has 17 percent of the world’s population living on slightly more than 2.4 percent of its land. The National Population Stabilization Fund seeks to pare down the growth to sustainable levels by means of contraception and reproductive and child-health care.
Officials say it might take some Indian states 18 to 45 years to achieve the stabilizing fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. The government originally set 2010 as the date for achieving the goal.
Nearly half of Indian women marry by age 18, and many become mothers soon afterward. And 188 million couples in India are in the reproductive age group, but only 53 percent of them use contraceptives.
“No lecturing involved”
“The call center fills a critical information gap that exists in Indian society about these issues,” said Shailaja Chandra, executive director of the National Population Stabilization Fund. “This is the first line of call for many young men and women who would otherwise end up going to street-corner quacks, use inappropriate contraception methods or not use any. There is no lecturing involved. People call and ask questions, and we empower them with answers.”
Many calls are from hinterlands underserved by health care and social workers. From May to October, the center received more than 25,000 calls, and most of the questions were about contraceptive methods. Most calls were made from the privacy of cellphones, which are common in Indian villages. Some men called on behalf of their wives.
The family-planning call center’s biggest problem is that the phone number is not toll-free. When the lines opened in June, the center received almost 800 calls a day. But slowly the number declined to 250 a day.
