Adopt decent family planning policy, Assam CM to minority community

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has called upon the minority community to adopt decent family planning policy for poverty reduction and warned that there would be conflicts over land in future if the state’s population continued to explode.Talking to newsmen in Guwahati on Thursday, he said, some political parties and organisations are seeking the rehabilitation of people evicted. If the state’s population keeps growing, a day will come when there will be a problem of living space and it will create conflicts.

 If we can control the population, we can solve several social problems, he said and added that the population is rising and people will need living space. I want to tell those who are saying there should not be any eviction drive that the government cannot allow people to settle down in forests, temples and ‘satras. Sarma said that the Assam government would take some more steps to encourage population control and urged AIUDF and AAMSU to work on this front. The government stands for the development of all communities but it will need community support, he said. “To remove poverty, we have to educate Muslim women and control population. We are there to educate women and reduce poverty. However, poverty will never get reduced unless you control your population,” Sarma said.

The CM said,if the Bodos and the Mishings had not practised small family size, they would have also been forced to go to forests and settle down there. In the last 20 years, no Bodo or Mishing encroached upon forest land. They adopted a different lifestyle to live with forests. They have conserved forests and created new ones. Recently, the authorities evicted around 200 encroachers, mostly migrant Muslims, from over 400 bighas of government land in Hojai, Karimganj and Darrang districts. The AAMSU urged the government to stop harassing the minority people under a “communal agenda”.The Muslims constitute around 30% of Assam’s 3.30 crore population