Munshi Ram, an illiterate laborer who lives in a crude mud hut in the village of Babarpur, India, 60 miles north of New Delhi, has no land and very little money. But he has eight children, and he regards them as his greatest wealth.

“It’s good to have a big family,” Mr. Ram explained, as he stood in the shade of a leafy tree, in a hard dry courtyard crowded with children, chickens, and a dozing cow. “They do not cost much and when they get old enough to work they bring in money. And when I am old, they will take care of me.”

Millions of Indians share Mr. Ram’s view. And that, in the opinion of a number of family-planning workers, is a major obstacle to the effort to curb the rapid growth of this country’s population.

A decade or so ago, many people here, including some of the Americans who had flooded in to help, assumed that once a villager understood birth control, he would practice it, so as to keep his family small and thus improve his economic status. But lately some experts have concluded that simply spreading the word about birth control, and providing the means, is not enough, because many poor people actively want to have more children, even after they know how not to. A Harvard-educated sociologist named Mahmood Mamdani put it this way in a recent study here:

“People are not poor because they have large families. Quite the contrary, they have large families because they are poor. To practice contraception would have meant to willfully court economic disaster.”

Some of the reasons relate to social customs that the government is trying to abolish. The dowry system, for example, often compels a couple with two or three daughters to keep trying for sons to offset the economic liability they will face when their daughters marry.

For Mr. Ram, a man in his mid-fifties who wears a tattered gray turban and an Indian dhoti, having eight children means security, especially since five of them are rarely here, but no matter what kind of disaster befalls Babarpur, he said, there will almost certainly be someone to take care of him until he dies.

His wife’s view appeared to be of little consequence. When any questions about family planning were put to her, Mrs. Ram, a woman of about 45, giggled shyly and turned away without answering.

In a similar village west of here, a water carrier recently greeted a visiting social worker this way: “ You were trying to convince me in 1960 that I should not have any more sons. Now, you see, I have six sons and two daughters, and I sit at home in leisure. They are grown up and they bring me money. You told me I was a poor man and could not support a large family. Now you see, because of my large family, I am a rich man.”

The effects on the society at large, of course, are quite different from the effects noted by these two proud fathers of eight. With 600 million people, and a pace of development that never quite outdistances the population growth, India is making a determined effort to bring down its birth rate, which is currently about 35 per 1,000, more than twice that in the United States.

Several Indian states are drafting legislation that would force the sterilization of people who have more than two or three children, and the federal government is strengthening its programs of incentives to encourage voluntary sterilization. But India has nearly 60,000 villages like this one, and few people think that compulsion will really be possible all across the land.

“The best contraceptive is development,” says Health Minister Karan Singh, meaning that when people’s standards of living are raised, and health care improves, their birth rate declines without compulsion or government pressure. “Where child mortality is high, fertility is high, because people are never sure whether their children are going to survive, so they have more children than they require.” Mr. Singh said recently.

The family of eight children that Mr. Ram had here in Babarpur is, statistically, the size that many Indians have thought they had to aim for over the years to be sure that, after allowing for girls, and for boys who die during youth, they would still have two adult sons.

Mr. Ram, who says he is not likely to have more children, is aware that the government is now campaigning hard with the birth-control slogan, “Stop at two.” But he has no regrets. “Children are the gods’ gift,” he said, as several of his own clustered around him. “Who are we to say they should not be born?”