Daughter’s Life For Father’s Seat: Man Drowns Daughter To Meet Two-Child Policy
Trigger Warning: Death, Murder, Brutality
“Do bacche meethi kheer, usse zyada bawaseer,” because the literal translation is off-putting, this slogan says that two kids are the perfect recipe for a healthy family; the third one will spoil the broth. Many such slogans advocating population control have become famous worldwide over the years. While sitting in the urban milieu and taking a bird’s-eye view of the masses makes campaigning seem necessary and amusing, must we pause to consider its true implications?
A six-year-old girl was reported missing on 29th of January 2026, in Telangana’s Nizamabad district. In the afternoon, the head constable received a call reporting that a body had been found pulled out of the Nizamabad Sagar Distributory Canal and was unresponsive. On reaching the scene, the head constable noticed the absence of any bloating and a glittering bindi shining on a bruised forehead. He soon realised that she had been discovered just a few moments late. A case was registered under Section 194 of the criminal code, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), provision for cases of suicide and unnatural deaths. Meanwhile the hunt for her family began and through WhatsApp forwards and audio messages a relative identified that the girl was from Mukhed and daughter of a hair salon owner from Maharashtra. She had been reported missing, and after the autopsy, the body was handed over to the parents, who returned home.
But the case had just started. How would a child end up in a canal at such a height alone? Surrounded by three villages, the canal feeds the Nizam Sugar Factory and the lush paddy fields. It was unusual for a child to have wandered off the canal’s side bunds. The father was contacted and asked to come down to the police station in Bodhan. He conveyed how distressing the past few days had been, awaiting information on their child. The police then showed CCTV footage of his daughter riding as a pillion on a bike driven by a man. The man was identified as Pandurag Baburao Kodamangle, her father. On pressurising Kodamangale, the police unexpectedly unravelled a real-life horror story as this father of three children premeditated the murder of his daughter to be eligible for the local body elections, which had a two-child family criterion for eligibility.
Fallacy in the 2-child policy
Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948 by the United Nations, states that men and women have a right to marry and “found a family.” This has been interpreted as the individual right to choose whether to be a parent and how many children to have. However, the right to reproductive autonomy has been restricted in countries facing demographic imbalances due to population growth. The dramatically emphasised dilemma of ‘family versus the nation’ has been invoked to justify restrictions on this commonly accepted basic right. China famously enacted the ‘One-Child Policy’ in 1980 and restricted urban residents to one child, while allowing some exceptions to the rural population and ethnic minorities. The exception was the unfortunate birth of a female child, which demanded corrective justice for the distressed families deprived of a male progeny. Under the guise of widely available contraceptives, financial benefits and employment incentives, the regime ran in parallel forced abortions, severe penalties on violators and mass sterilisations by local officials who had to meet the birth quota.
As if they had overcome a pandemic, the government claims that 400 million births were ‘prevented’ and that 2016 saw the enactment of the ‘Two-Child Policy.’ This was merely a reward or a form of relaxation, but a distress response to the dual challenges of a shrinking workforce and an ageing population, often called the ‘demographic time bomb’. China had a skewed gender ratio with 33 million more men than women, thousands of disappeared and/or abandoned girls and millions of ‘over quota‘ children who were born in secret and never registered. Demeaningly called “black children” (heihaizi) who lacked a hukou (residency permit), they were denied public education, healthcare, and legal employment.
By 2021, the policy revision could not close the gap, and the ‘Three-Child Policy‘ was enacted. The social-maintenance fees for over-quota births were abolished, and five years hence, on January 1, 2026, China ended a 30-year tax exemption on contraceptives, imposing a 13% value-added tax (VAT) on condoms, birth control pills, and devices. Increasing the retirement age and covering the cost of prenatal checkups and childbirth are urgent actions, given that China’s fertility rate is 1.0 (the replacement level is 2.1) and it recorded the lowest birth rate last year since its founding in 1949. Not such a fun fact is that this does not bode well for the entire population, who now face inflated prices in education and housing.
Most populated country’s story
India is home to one of the youngest populations in the world, and it surpassed China in 2023 to become the most populous country. 17.8% of the world’s population lives here, and 50% of it is under the age of 25. Yet, the nation is unhappy. On the one hand, experts signal a far-future scenario given the rapid decline in the total fertility rate to 1.9, which could lead to a labour shortage and increased dependence on the elderly. On the other hand, are fears of “demographic collapse” harvested by political leaders and tech billionaires.
Be it Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the right-wing socio-political organisation Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), presenting his 3-child Logic and issuing warnings over possible perishing or recent Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu urging families in the Southern states to counter the delimitation injustices by having more children; divided by ideologies, the right and left have found a common ground in the bedroom.
However, elderly Indians remember the horrors of the Emergency Period (1975-1977) when the then Prime Minister’s son, Sanjay Gandhi ran his compulsory sterilisation campaign, coercing more than 6.2 million men in 1976 alone through forceful vasectomies, denials of salaries or schemes, demolition of houses and the infamous firing of Delhi’s residents protesting against this near the Turkman Gate.
Officially, other than family planning campaigns, the central government has not endorsed a restriction on child births. But many states are introducing coercive legislation to ensure population control. For example, the states of Assam and Rajasthan made government employment ineligible for candidates with more than 2 children. Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh have adopted policies that disqualify candidates contesting local body elections if they have three children.
From here, we go to Kerur, a village in Maharashtra, where 3000 residents are solely dependent on agriculture for livelihood and are going to cast their votes to elect the next Panchayat in six months. The village has recently reserved its seat for the Other Backwards Classes (women) category, igniting political ambitions among many. One such person was Padurang Baburao Kodamangale.
A daughter’s life for father’s ambitions
With the sitting Sarpanch, Shinde’s encouragement and promise of ₹15 lakh, Kodamangale was bolstered to submit his wife, Ankita’s name for candidacy. The only roadblock, however, was the two-child policy. He considered giving up his three-year-old son for adoption to one of his uncles, as he did not have a birth certificate, but dropped the plan, fearing the local hospital records of the delivery. It is unknown how, from this plan, he narrowed down his options to killing one of his children and ended up choosing one of the twin sisters, who, according to Ankita, “was particularly fond of him and him of her.” One reason can be that the other twin was not comfortable on bike rides.
The details are particularly disturbing, of the child not going to school but to her father’s salon on January 29th, Kodamangale covering his face and leaving his phone behind, indicating that he premeditated the murder and then dropping the child in the canal after a long bike ride from Mukhed to Bodhan. On Ankita’s inquiries, he pretended to be unsure of his daughter’s whereabouts and approached the local police station, but did not file a formal complaint.
On February 2, the police revised the charges to Sections 130(1), 140(1) and 238 of the BNS for charges of murder, kidnapping, and destruction of evidence, respectively. They arrested Kodamangale and Shinde, who, being the Sarpanch, is receiving massive local support for his release. The mother and the siblings have moved to their relatives’ house.
Costs of Coercion
History has proven that coercive population control methods are counterproductive and violate fundamental human rights. When laws and policies are enacted to serve as ‘wins’ in a status report, they lose the core purpose of protection. Such laws in particular target marginalised and vulnerable communities, and cause gender injustices by incentivising secretive sex-selective practices in India, such as the revelation of the foetus’s gender, infanticide, foeticide, child murder, abandonment or lifelong rejection.
In the long term, China is the best case study to argue that no economic progress is worth the lives, freedom and trust of the citizens in the government. Moreover, citing the low fertility rate of 1.5 in the state, N. Chandrababu Naidu revoked the three-decade-old child policy in Panchayat elections in 2024. Though the Supreme Court upheld Rajasthan’s two-child norm for government jobs, the state rescinded the policy in 2025 due to protests by the rural population. Last month, Telangana‘s state legislative assembly unanimously scrapped a similar law for local body polls. Yet, in several states, child-restriction policies and related incentives continue to exist. This case must be an eye-opener for our legislators, showing that there is more to family planning than the number of children born. It concerns bodily autonomy, consent education, the age of marriage, contraceptive measures, and major considerations related to poverty, illiteracy, societal expectations, and community practices.
Second year student of Media Studies at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), BRC, Bangalore. A trained Kathak dancer, theatre artist and political nerd.