Planning - a case study !

In a long conversation with a Chinese woman, who partners with my team for a release, opened my eyes to new dimensions of planning.

How big a project can we plan ? Contemporary human being has landed on moon. I am sure that needed a lot of planning and course corrections on its way.

So, even landing on moon seems much smaller than the planning case study I am going to present.

Population Control in China !

A nation with 1.3 billion people today was just 500 Million post world war 2. The population grew at a much faster rate during the 80s.

So the party needed a plan to control it which led to 1979 "One Child Policy".

Now, here are some details of the policy how it works. Some fact may shock you as it shocked me.

1. The minimum age of a MAN to apply for marriage license - 25
2. The minimum age of a WOMAN to apply for marriage license - 23
3. The SUM of ages of both should be minimum 50

With all that a couple goes and applies for marriage license. Now, they can have just one kid.

For the kid - one needs to apply for kid, out of a quota given to each agency for a year. If few of the first births turn out to be twins-triplets, then the calculation churns.

Even if you are going to have just one kid, you can not have it anytime. Each year, each agency gets a number as yearly quota. One has to plan and reserve a number before planning to have a kid that year.

There is a big department that tracks the quotas for each org / agency. Each quota again divides in to smaller ones and from a billion plus to a few hundreds in a spreadsheet level.

Thats a astronomical amount of planning involving 1.3 Billion people and many more to come, in a controlled manner.

Objective, the nation had and the results it is getting, both look perfectly aligned.

Its just matter of time the neighboring India will take the population top spot from China (it might already have - census in India works once in 10 years :)


If such a unthinkable problem can be framed, dreamed about, planned and executed, then nothing is impossible.