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.