Tribal leaders in India's remote northeast are offering cash rewards to women who bear more than a dozen children in a bid to keep from being outnumbered by settlers from elsewhere, a leader said yesterday.
In the past two months, Khasi tribal chieftains in Meghalaya State have paid 16,000 rupees (US$348) each to four such women including 45-year-old Amilia Sohtun, who has 17 children, said H.S. Shylla, a member of the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council.
Sohtun runs a tea stand at Laitkor Peak, a tourist spot near Meghalaya's capital, Shillong.
Tribal elders defended the move, which has infuriated many women and health activists.
"Our community faces a genuine threat of being outnumbered by outsiders, and the only way we can prevent our race from becoming extinct is to ensure our population rises soon enough," Shylla said.
The council is an elected administrative body of tribal leaders in Meghalaya. It works with the state government on development issues, and makes decisions regarding customary community rules.
The Khasis, numbering less than a million, are the majority community in Christian-dominated Meghalaya, which has 2.5 million people.
"The community is worried about an unabated influx of migrants from outside the state," Shylla said.
However, some in the state decried the incentive program.
"We oppose the idea because no one has the right to keep having babies unless she can provide them with a quality life," said Theilin Phanbuh, an activist in Shillong.
"It is for the authorities to check the influx or settlement of outsiders in traditional land belonging to our people. Increasing our community's population by having more children is not the answer," she said.
Meghalaya health activist Hasina Kharbhih also slammed the idea.
"A woman's body is not a machine that she can go on having babies. The government must intervene on the Khasi Council's decision because of the health issues involved," she said.
Shylla said the decision to pay mothers of more than 12 "has been generally welcomed."
The council has received four more requests for cash incentives from women with more than a dozen children, Shylla said.
In Meghalaya's matrilineal society, a man moves into his bride's home and their children take the mother's maiden name.
Meghalaya is one of the seven states in India's northeast where fears of migration from other parts of India and Bangladesh have helped fuel separatist revolts.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS