New Delhi, November 4: Laws that penalise people for having more than two children have lost their relevance, the Supreme Court said on Wednesday, referring its own 2003 judgment in Javed v. State of Haryana — which had upheld such disqualifications — to a larger bench for reconsideration, LiveLaw reported.

Source: LiveLaw

A bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe also set aside the disqualification of Mangala Bhimrao, a former sarpanch of Kakoda gram panchayat in Maharashtra, who had been removed under Section 14(1)(j-1) of the Maharashtra Village Panchayat Act, 1959 after the birth of her third child.

"We are of the strong opinion that the laws which penalise having more than two children have lost their relevance. The foundation of such laws, that is the fear of overpopulation, has crumbled due to demographic changes in the past few decades," Justice Narasimha said while pronouncing the verdict, according to LiveLaw.

The Court noted that India's total fertility rate has fallen from 3 in 2003, when Javed upheld Haryana's two-child bar, to 1.9 today — below the replacement rate of 2.1 at which one generation exactly replaces itself. A fall below that level, the bench warned, leads to a demographic transition marked by an ageing population and a shrinking share of working-age people.

As per the compilation placed before the Court by amicus curiae Rukmini Bobde, seven states have already repealed the two-child norm and fifteen states never had such a policy, while states that still retain it include Assam, Goa, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttarakhand, LiveLaw reported. During earlier hearings in the same case, the bench had called the norm a "useless policy" and said perpetuating it appeared "completely unconstitutional" in the present demographic situation, Bar and Bench reported.

Source: Bar and Bench

The judgment, reserved on August 4, does not by itself strike down any state's law — that question now goes to the larger bench. But the strong wording signals that two-child disqualification laws still on the books in several states face their most serious constitutional challenge in over two decades.