M S Swaminathan, the father of India's Green Revolution, has said that for a long and happy life, India needs a two-child policy, but adds that there shouldn't be an enforcement in this regard. Here are the excerpts from his interview to CNN-News18's Poornima Murli.

Do you think growing population is a grave issue?

Yes, it is. There is a limit to which population can be supported by the ecosystem. We must respect the ecosystem’s capacity of supporting the population growth. Even in current times, we continue to have problems with drinking water for everyone, soil for agriculture, etc.

If we really want to have a long, happy life, we need this two-child policy campaign. The population will stabilise if children are born out of happy times, and not out of desperate measures for existence.

We should not implement it the way the Chinese have done it. We should respect what a particular family wants. If the family has two boys or two girls and wants to have another child to balance it, then we should not stop it.

We must, however, respect nature and its capacity to sustain people.

So, why do you support the enforcement of 2-child policy?

I don’t support any enforcement. I support education and information to the people. They must be taught ways of family planning. As I said before, we should not implement the policy the way Chinese have. They brought in a law. We must not regulate it. We must educate all stakeholders.

What in your opinion will this policy look like?

In the area of family planning, a number of recommendations have been made from time to time. All of them have been to ensure that our population size and the capacity of our ecosystem to support the population are in balance.

The government has also supported the idea of educating families on planning children. I had recommended that Panchayat Raj institution should develop a social-demographic chart which indicates to what extent the population can grow. You can’t depend on nature to balance it all out and provide for everyone. Population size also has a limit.

Such policies must be implemented at the most local level possible. Orissa is a good example where population growth was curbed to a large extent after families were found to have two children. Japan is an extreme example where they’ve curbed population to an extent that there are no people to plough the field. So, while this policy is good, we must make sure it’s not extreme.