It was 1970 when Zohran Mamdani’s father Mahmood Mamdani, an acclaimed researcher, came to Punjab. His motivation was to evaluate the outcomes of “The Khanna Study”, India’s first major field study in birth control which experts from the Harvard School of Public Health led with help from Indian field officers.

Named after Punjab’s market town, where it was headquartered, the study centred on Punjab’s Manupur village and was the first birth control programme which had both the control population (not given contraception) and the test population (given contraception). It sought to study the impact of pills as a population control measure. Mamdani later proved it was a failure and explained why.

He presented the evaluation in “The Myth of Population Control”, which showed that investigators

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