Women, Biopower and the Making of Demographic Knowledge: India’s Demographic and Health Survey

Abstract

Control of population–control both of the numbers of people and of their actions–is vital to modern development. Demography, with its disciplinary interest in population data collection and commitment to population control, legitimizes and reinforces development discourse with the “facticity” of its numbers. Women are at the center of these efforts. We analyze the Demographic and Health Survey (part of a group of surveys that can be considered at the center of demographic knowledge of non-industrialized countries) in order to examine the discourse of population control in India and other Third World countries. In India, population control and management has long been the goal of governing powers, colonial and Indian; the DHS is only the most recent intervention in this population management project. We deconstruct the DHS and examine the historical and epistemological background of that survey project to demonstrate and illuminate the connection between demography and development. We argue that questionnaire methodology and its related epistemology are connected to a particular developmentalist ideology and practice, one that relies on neoliberal ideology with its rhetoric of individual choice and free market that works to manage and control women’s bodies and lives in the name of necessary demographic change.