Addendum to the 'Population Bomb' post

If India’s population could have been held down even to the 1971 level (around 550 million – which would be gigantic by any standards already), we could have been two and half times richer per capita as we are today at the current GDP level, which would have put us firmly among the middle-income countries in the world. Reflect on that, please?

There would not have been the kind of unthinkably huge unemployment, underemployment and disguised unemployment problem as we have today: two million plus candidates sitting for school service qualifying exams when there are just a few hundred or at best few thousand vacancies, and people so desperate to get jobs with a modicum of security, even with very modest salaries, that MBAs and PhDs routinely apply for teaching positions in primary school, or as peons and clerks in government offices, knowing that there are tens of millions who are far worse off, cleaning sewers manually, hauling building materials at construction sites for a pittance, or working as virtually bonded labour, whether that be for old fashioned roadside eateries, vehicle repair workshops and domestic service or with new fangled body shoppers like Amazon. Only those who have lived mollycoddled and secure lives insured by their parents – that would be barely 10% of the population – can live in denial of this elephant in the room. I am ashamed to think that 99% of my ex students belong to that category!

We are still producing nearly 50,000 babies a day (half the babies born on the planet are Indian: did you know that?), adding anything between 4 and 12 million to the job-seeker army every year, on top of the vast existing army of the unemployed, mind you – no country, not the ones with the best technology, most capital, brightest ideas and most intense political will can keep on creating jobs for that kind of number year on year – as both Amit Shah and Mamata Banerjee have publicly admitted in their more candid and despairing moments. We are happily oblivious that we are sitting on a recipe for surefire social disaster: an enormous number of this virally growing army is sure to turn to every kind of unsocial and antisocial behaviour, from beggary to crime and organised political thuggery, just because those are the only ‘careers’ open to them, until our country becomes entirely dysfunctional, where nobody except the biggest tycoons (a few ten thousand people in a land of 1.4+ billion) can keep their lives, dignity and property safe any more. It takes a very special faculty to be blind to the fact that this is already happening!

One of the stupidest excuses I hear is ‘why should we mend our ways when the rich western countries are eating so much more and polluting so much more?’ I have grown tired over four decades as a teacher telling little children that pointing fingers at others’ misdemeanours never takes away your responsibility for correcting your own. Even if that contrary argument were true, 60-65 million Germans, however hard they try, cannot drink more water or shit more than 1400 million Indians do! As I have often said in many other contexts, you can be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

As for the old canard that India continues perpetually to be ‘rich’ in natural resources, this is either so ignorant and naïve or so bloody-minded that I hate to even engage with it. One simply needs to look up hard data from the best sources to find out what population pressure has already done to our forests and wildlife and groundwater reserves and soil fertility, and what the most conservative projections show for 2040-50 if we still merrily go the way we are going.

Finally, addressing the request that I should take cognizance of the ‘many other serious problems’ that we are supposedly facing – such as endemic corruption in politics and government at all levels – I would like my detractors to name three which do not either stem directly from overpopulation or are grossly exacerbated and sometimes made totally intractable because of it (the inability of governments in the most densely populated states to acquire land for the most urgently needed public projects, from hospitals to roads, is a glaring case in point).

Ultimately, if it all boils down to the fact that there are lots of supposedly educated people around, even among my readers, who have already closed their minds and will not be swayed by fact and reason, I am all the more convinced, most gloomily, that we are fated for a very nasty future.

The time has come

It is nice to see that one of my recent posts (A little slower, if you please)  has not only climbed quickly to the top of the most-read list but also brought back an old one: Is speed always conducive to human happiness?  I was sure it isn’t when I was very young, and the older I grow the more convinced I become that I have been right all along – and how ironical this is considering that as a teacher I have always urged my pupils not to dawdle, dally and procrastinate!

Another beloved post, A small dose of political philosophy, has also got back into that list on its own. As I have said and not once before, I keep wondering what brings people back to certain posts, who those people are, and what they are getting from reading these things I have written.

I hope that more visitors would read the post titled Anne Frank and my daughter, and those who have read the classic Diary of a young girl should get their hands on the new book I have mentioned there, The Legacy of Anne Frank: they are sure to like it.

During my latest trip to Delhi, I visited Banjara Market in Gurgaon, because Pupu needed to buy a large ornate mirror and some other bric à brac, and that is a place where such things can be bought dirt cheap, unlike places like the Cottage Industries Emporium, which have become watering holes for the dirty rich. These tribals have set up quite a little village by the roadside amidst the forest of residential towers in the new city. They live in makeshift huts – though they even have water coolers and washing machines around, I couldn’t figure out what they use for toilets – and while they flaunt smartphones and motorbikes and streaked hairdos, they still dress traditionally, and work and play are simultaneous, with mothers nursing, housewives making roti on open chullahs while scolding their husbands for trying to make foolish deals, wizened grandmas sagely pulling away at burbling hookahs and rolling their eyes at all and sundry. Some of the young girls, covered head to foot in flowing salwar, kameez and dupatta, looked like living Madonnas, putting all the cute and expensively dolled up customers with their assembly-line produced waxed legs, plunging necklines and donkey-like features to shame. They were living poorly and precariously by metro standards, it was clear enough, but definitely much better off than they would have at home in their native states. Interestingly, the wikipedia article on the Banjara tribe says they have enjoyed gender equality for ages. I wonder whether the civic authorities will give them a permanent and better settlement deal someday, or just uproot them with bulldozers and drive them away one fine morning. India is a strange, beautiful, and truly heartbreaking country.

I have been reading in my newspapers that the governments both at state and central level and thinking of ‘getting serious’ about reining in the plastic menace. Why don’t they dig their heels in and simply close down all the factories producing single-use bags and other containers? Talk about arrant hypocrisy. Meanwhile the world gets self-righteously furious that the president of Brazil laughs to hear that the great Amazon rain forest is burning away… and that reminds me, for those of you who are Netflix subscribers, do watch the three-episode show called The Future of Water. If I had my way, I would ask every one of my current pupils and their parents to do so.

My daughter has started her working career with an NGO that concerns itself with the education of disadvantaged children. Twelve years ago I wrote I fervently wished that she would do something meaningful, and not fritter away her life as a corporate executive selling soap. I am deeply thankful to Providence that she has been allowed to go that way, and I have lived to see it. Of course there will be other jobs, more education and new hobbies in the years to come, but I hope she always enjoys doing what she is allowed to do, and finds fulfillment. I have wished the same for all my pupils; alas, most of them and their parents did not even understand what I was blessing them with.

One last thing for now. I have been changing some very old habits with age, though very slowly. For ages I hoped that lots of old boys and girls will keep in touch; for ages I also did all I could to stay in touch. I have accepted with a profound sigh that that doesn’t happen: at least, not to me. Most of them just forget; at worst they vilify me from far away. The best of them gradually drift away after keeping the line alive for many years at a stretch. So these days I have stopped bothering about returning calls. It used to be a habit of mine to reply within 24 hours by email at least with a ‘thank you for writing, will get back at length very soon’; these days I don’t do that any longer with people who suddenly decide to communicate after a gap of a decade or more. It has happened far too many times that they write tentatively, then get back ecstatically once or twice when I respond with warmth and eagerness, and then simply fall off the planet again. It’s just not worth it by any yardstick to get back to such people at all.

[The title of this post, for those who cannot recognise it, comes from a poem of Lewis Carroll’s titled The Walrus and the Carpenter:

“…the time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things,

Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”

I shall not waste my time trying to explain the humour in those lines.]

The population bomb

After Swachchh Bharat, I have reason to congratulate prime minister Narendra Modi for the second time. In his address to the nation on Independence Day, he has dared – as no PM has since Indira Gandhi – to take our most serious problem by the horns and urge the nation to start thinking about how to solve it before it is too late: to wit, the enormous and still-too-rapidly growing population.

Even at the turn of the 19th century, the British and other foreigners used to talk about ‘India’s teeming and hungry millions’ (yes, foreign rulers made things bad by not governing in our interest, but can they really be blamed for our huge fertility rates?) For those who do not know, the great divide in India’s population story was 1921: before that, war, pestilence, flood and famine still kept our numbers in some control (albeit in a very cruel way), but then a bit of science and good governance took over, and our population exploded. It is estimated that India’s population in 1947 was around 350 million; that had shot up to 547 million by the time of the 1971 census, when I first become conscious of such things, and since then we have added about 800 million to our numbers – more than the entire continent of Europe! Our worst enemies are those ‘scholars’ and other fools who are still debating whether our population is ‘too big’ or not, ‘exploding’ or not. I suppose they will be convinced only if and when we are reduced to cannibalism. Thank God our prime minister is less stupid than the eggheads, and bolder.

We occupy just 2.4% of the world’s land area, but have to accommodate and feed and educate and employ and keep under some control almost 18% of the global population. We often compare our plight with China’s, blithely ignoring the fact that while we have nearly caught up with her population-wise, she is more than three times as big area wise, so the average population density there is only about one-third! Following in the footsteps of the Father of the Nation (it has been well said that the mistakes of giants are also gigantic) our school textbooks and millions of schoolteachers still continue to indoctrinate hundreds of millions of children with the insane idea that there is nothing called a population problem, because India is supposedly ‘rich’ in all kinds of natural resources, despite the terrible facts that our rivers and groundwater are dangerously overdrawn, our cities are groaning under the weight of people the majority of whom are forced to live worse than animals in advanced nations, our land is underforested and overcultivated, our schools and hospitals and police and transport- and judicial systems creaking under incredible overloads, there is a tremendous hunger even for menial, ill-paid jobs, billionaires cannot afford the kind of privacy and pollution-free environments that very ordinary people can in all the sparsely populated rich countries of the world – simply because there are too many of us around.

Legitimate concerns have been raised at once, of course, as they should in any healthily functioning democracy. If the problem is to be speedily solved, such concerns much be convincingly addressed at the very outset. One is that the southern states are worried they will be electorally punished for being successful with birth control unlike the ‘Bimaru’ states, another is that the Muslim community may be unfairly singled out and targeted, despite the fact that their net fertility rate, too, has been steadily coming down (read this article).

Education, especially that of females, has been shown to be most effective in bringing down the fertility rate. Raising the minimum marriageable age for women to 21 and enforcing it much more strictly by law may be considered too (far too many girls are still married off well before they are even 18). So also significant monetary incentives, especially for the poor, to have one-child families, even if the child is a girl: this, combined with a revived mass publicity campaign involving celebrities could work wonders, especially if the central government can persuade the most errant states to go along. Draconian measures of any sort hurt people far more than they are effective in achieving desired goals, as the Chinese experience has proved, but gentle coercion might go a long way, such as mild penalties for parents who have more than three children.

By current estimates, India’s population is likely to ‘stabilize’ at around 1.7-1.8 billion sometime in the latter half of this century. It would be very nice if it did so sooner, at a smaller number. Then other problems – the problems of richer nations – will kick in, such as a ‘greying’ population, and ever smaller numbers in the working age bracket to feed and care for them. Still, we have time to cross those bridges. Meanwhile, a huge time bomb is ticking away, and the prime minister has rung the warning bell. I hope he takes his own warning seriously, and can persuade  party, parliament,  judiciary, media and the country at large to follow suit, and soon.

Working in Ladakh

Shilpi has written about her recent work-related trip to Ladakh, here.

Read about the kind of work she did, and her friend does, studying marmots. It sounds like something straight out of a Gerald Durrell book. And look at the pictures. If this is work, I'd have loved it. And if this is what Ladakh feels like, I'd finally like to go there. I'd also want my daughter to have experiences like this while she is getting paid for it.

I am glad, Shilpi, that I goaded you into taking up this job!