Population bomb

The enormous population growth will one day eclipse whatever economic status India is supposed to attain in the years to come.

Demographers estimate that

ENGROSSED as we are with the problems of day-to-day life in our cities and in our villages, virtually no one except some worried demographers and scholars have time to consider the enormity of a calamity that is creeping upon us. This does not have the immediacy of a tsunami or a bomb blast, but over time its effect is far more devastating.

It is not climate change, a disaster that is also creeping upon us. But, it is going to come upon us far more slowly than the one that is the subject of this essay, which is the explosive rate of growth of the population of this country. We have grown so accustomed to patting ourselves on the back for being an emerging economic superpower that we seem to have lost sight of this terrible disaster that will one day eclipse whatever economic status we are supposed to have or acquire in the years to come. (Nobody ever says just when we will actually become an economic superpower; we are ever the economic giant whose time is about to come but never does.)

We have been lulled into a state of complacency by such soothing findings as the slowing down of the rate of growth of the population and never reflect on the fact that the population is still growing and that the rate of growth is still alarming in the extreme. It is estimated that it will take several decades before the population stabilises and it will do so, according to the projections of demographers, when the number of people in India exceeds 1.5 billion; roughly, therefore, there will be an addition of a number that is almost double that of the total population of India at the time of Independence. And all this in only 2.4 per cent of the land mass of the earth, something that will remain the same.

In 2007, we are told that the population is around 1.1 billion; so we are going to add another 400 million more before the population stabilises. That, on present indications, is still a hope, rather than a forecast. And it is not just a question of the terrible effect this will have on all aspects of our economy on employment, education, health, housing and everything else but the truly ominous skewed nature of this growth.

Today the southern States have achieved, or are about to achieve, replacement levels, that is a stable population size, where the number of births and the number of deaths is more or less the same. But at the other extreme is a region that comprises Bihar, Chhattisgarh, eastern Uttar Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan where the growth of the population is not only unchecked but is virtually out of control. Experts have found that hardly 53 per cent of this region has any access to family planning methods condoms, or other devices, not to mention contraceptive pills or any facilities for vasectomies or laparoscopy. In other words, even if a couple in these areas want to limit their families they have no access to any means by which to do it.

What this will mean over time is that, as the population in the southern States stabilises at certain given levels, the numbers in this region are going to keep increasing at virtually the same rate at which they are increasing now, and there will be many more job-seekers, many more in need of education or seeking education, many more in need of health care; in general, the resources of the country will increasingly have to be poured into this region to meet the needs of the ever increasing numbers.

That is not all, by any means. Today there is a noticeable increase in the economic development of the South. More is being invested there, more jobs are being created and, naturally, more wealth.

There is inevitably going to be a movement of the impoverished and unemployed from the high growth rate regions to these States, and to other parts of the country where economic development is greater, the areas that make the world refer to India today as an emerging economic superpower and may well, in the future, make it a true economic superpower.

We are seeing then a division in the country. One region is going to have, if it does not already have, a stable population and in addition increased economic development. And the other is going to have a population growing at a rate that is virtually out of control and which is economically backward, providing little in terms of employment and wealth.

The consequent migration will, inevitably, result in social tensions, as resentment grows among the local people at the influx of outsiders. We have had instances of this happening in earlier years in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra and, for similar if not the same reasons, in Assam. There is no reason to assume that it will not happen in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh.

Indeed, it is not a simple North-South issue here. Parts of Haryana and almost the whole of Punjab are already growing in economic prosperity; and in these States, too, the population growth has begun to fall off, and replacement levels will be reached in these areas in a few years from now. Here, too, what may be tolerated for a time may turn into resentment and then into anger that translates into violence as waves of unemployed, impoverished people from the high growth areas begin to pour in, looking for employment.

Economic tensions will inevitably lead to social anger and hatred, and thus will be sown the seeds of the fragmentation of the country. There is little hope of the rising up of some great leader who will, like the leaders of the freedom struggle, unite and sensitise the country to larger issues.

Our political leadership will have descended to even lower depths of pettiness and sleaze by then. The prospect before the Indians who have the misfortune of being alive and actively involved in the economic and social activity of the country at that time will be to confront the spectre of further partitions and divisions. Of insurgencies and movements that will be fuelled by the economic and social disparities, which will be then very evident.

It is, consequently, essential that something be done now to avert that disaster which will, through the middle of this century, engulf the country. It is time for our planners to recognise the enormity of this disaster, and to put together a group that can prepare a plan to involve all sections of society in preventing this from happening. In the target areas, concentrated unremitting work is needed to reverse or at least to slow the explosive growth rate. Chief among all of the work they do must be the provision of facilities it is a disgrace that even today in a district such as Bhagalpur more than half of the villages (58 per cent) do not have access even to condoms, which could certainly be put on sale in pan shops in the district.

It only needs some organised work by persons within the administrative system. If it can be sustained with every section of the people actively involved, perhaps the generations to come can cope with the enormous population of India in the 2050s.