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.