Sri Lanka Prime Minister: Please Have More Children
For years Sri Lanka has been held up as a model of what family planning efforts can achieve. Using a Small Is Beautiful campaign that began in the 1970s, Sri Lanka’s total fertility rate hovers around 2.1. But Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremaynayake says that small family sizes are preventing victory in Sri Lanka’s war against Tamil insurgents.
The Tamil Tiger rebel group has been waging a long civil war in Sri Lanka which has resulted in more than 63,000 killed on both sides. Recently the government launched a drive to enlist an additional 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 Buddhist monks. The effort fell flat and Wickremanayake blames the emphasis on smaller families.
At a rally he said, “It’s time for people to think that big is better” and complained that without more children to swell the ranks of the Sri Lankan army. The official government newsletter said the government plans to offer special bonuses to families who have more than two children.
Of course as The BBC noted, the failure of people to respond to the army’s recruitment drive probably has less to do with smaller families and more to do with the government’s lack of progress in actually winning the civil war.
Source:
Sri Lankans urged to multiply for war. The BBC, June 19, 2001.
The Sri Lanka Prime Minister: Please Have More Children by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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