Between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Indian viewers should no longer come across content promoting condoms. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has banned advertising of these contraceptives on the country’s 900 public and private channels. Objective declared by the government: to protect children from “indecent content”. Offenders face penalties. “It is (…) advised to all television stations not to broadcast advertisements for condoms which are for a particular age category and could be indecent (when they are) seen by children”, specifies the injunction given to the channels, taken up by Agence France Presse.
In this conservative and traditional society, the condom is considered taboo. This is not the first time that condom ads have been slammed in the country. Some (rare) voices are raised in India to criticize this restriction on advertisements seen as going in the opposite direction to raising awareness of a safe sex. “The nature of an advertisement can be debated, but an advertising ban is counterproductive and rooted in a shame that stigmatizes the attitude towards sex”, denounces Paromita Vohra, at Quartz, documentary maker and founder of Agents of Ishq, a multimedia project that encourages conversations about sex and love.
The little used condom
The height of the paradox, this government measure comes when India is the third country in the world where AIDS made the greatest number of victims. Despite this scourge, India has one of the lowest rates of condom use in the world, recalls the site Quartz. Between 2005 and 2015, the proportion of Indians using condoms increased from 5.2% to 5.6% according to the National Family Health Survey cited by the review. Female sterilization remains the most popular contraceptive method in India.
Read also:
Focus on the female condom
Condom: a big problem in the United States