Female Sterilization Followed by Condoms are the Most Preferred Modern Family Planning Methods in India

A large scale survey was conducted in 284 districts in nine states – Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Assam, and these states comprise of 48 percent of India’s population.

This recent survey was conducted in the year 2010-11 and the data was collected for three years (2007-09) from the mentioned nine states.  This data has brought into focus that male sterilization remains one of the least preferred methods adopted for family planning, whereas female sterilization is the most preferred method.  The percentage of male sterilization continues to remain negligible i.e. less than one percent in most of the districts. Although a few men do come forward for the procedure, there is still a lot to be done in order to make this method of family planning a success. Besides male sterilization, the other spacing modern methods also are not popular among masses except the ‘Condoms’ followed by ‘Pills’.  Like male sterilization, Copper –T/ IUD also are not being preferred by females.  Thus, the females are more adopting the sterilization (limiting) method and males are preferring the condoms (spacing method), if they really wish to adopt a modern method of family planning.