Satara - Cash Bonuses to Slow Birthrates

From NYT -  hope this works. I am in south now and population is in "control". UP and Bihar are human swamps. I have no clue how to fix it without going the China way. Actually, everyone knows the utopian panacea - increased literacy. It worked magic in southern India but spreading the literacy epidemic in UP and Bihar is similar to decimating the red/blue divide in the US.

"The program here in Satara is a pilot program — one of several initiatives across the country that have used a softer approach — trying to slow down population growth by challenging deeply ingrained rural customs. Experts say far too many rural women wed as teenagers, usually in arranged marriages, and then have babies in quick succession — a pattern that exacerbates poverty and spurs what demographers call “population momentum” by bunching children together. In Satara, local health officials have led campaigns to curb teenage weddings, as well as promoting the “honeymoon package” of cash bonuses and encouraging the use of contraceptives so that couples wait to start a family.
“This is how population stabilization will come,” said Rohini Lahane, an administrator in the district health office.

India averages about 2.6 children per family, far below what it was a half century ago, yet still above the rate of 2.1 that would stabilize the population. Many states with higher income and education levels are already near or below an average of two children per family. Yet the poorest and most populous states, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, average almost four children per family and have some of the lowest levels of female literacy."

While at this, here is coginitive dissonance of Paul R. Ehrlich:

"When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion - many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!!"