In the post-war, post-independence period, India became a key site of intervention and experimentation for international population control advocates. During the 1950s, the Government of India became the first government to announce an official policy of population limitation as part of its first Five Year Plan in 1952, constituting its own national population as an object of study and intervention. The Khanna Study—a well-known population control experiment conducted in the Ludhiana District of Punjab—is emblematic of these processes. Between 1953 and 1960, Khanna was the site of population control experimentation for the Indian State and international organisations alike. Through a case study of the Khanna Study, this dissertation asks why India was so important to strategies of international population control and, conversely, why population control was so important to the newly-independent Government of India. I argue that international population control advocates focused on India because of the scale, poverty and—crucially—accessibility of its population. International organisations were able to experiment upon the Indian population primarily because of the collaboration of the Government of India. Population control was of mutual interest to international ‘overpopulation’ theorists and for Indian officials, who viewed population growth as an obstacle to economic development. In an attempt to render the Indian population legible and, therefore, amenable to population control interventions, these actors collaborated to make Khanna—and India generally—a laboratory for population control. Although the Khanna Study did not succeed in its stated goal of reducing the birth rate, it nevertheless helped to consolidate the position of population control as national policy, and produced Khanna as a study site to be re-visited and re-studied over the following five decades. As such, the Khanna Study itself helped to solidify the relationships between India and population control, and between international population control and India.