POPULATION EXPLOSION

SANJOG MAHESHWARI

PEOPLE, POLITICS & POPULATION

-SANJOG MAHESHWARI

India has a meager 2.4% of the world surface area of 135.8 million Sq. meters. Yet, it has to support and sustain a whopping 16.8% of the world population. The population rise in India is so rapid and fast that from 238.4 million at the turn of the century, it scaled 1028 million mark in March 2001 and stands at staggering figure of around 1250 million now. As it hugely outstrips the severely limited natural resources, with an ever increasing margin, it has been entailing unbearable burden on the society. While, for the obvious reasons, the elite in the society enjoys immunity from the burden, the middle-class and the poor, both of urban and rural India, bear the burnt and continue to suffer in silence the miseries it entails in the form of severe scarcity of the limited natural resources and huge scramble for the scarce resources, uncontrolled spread of pandemic and epidemic diseases, malnutrition, starvation deaths, abject poverty, frequent visitations of natural calamities-droughts, floods etc. , unhygienic living conditions in slums and pigeon-hole flats, near absence of health and medical care, and such other maladies as are offshoots of environmental pollution, vagaries of weather, climate change, global warming and destruction of ecological balance.

Despite the fact that India was the first country to adopt a population policy, practically nothing has been done in terms of population control. As a result India is facing major crisis in the form of rapid depletion of its natural resources such as water, minerals, flora and fauna, fisheries etc. There is a fierce competition among the communities and sections of the population for the severely limited national resources such as land, forest and water which are being exploited to the hilt. Density of population is also responsible for the quick and uncontrolled spread of the recent scourge: pandemic H1N1 flu-the "swine-flu."

Population explosion in a country as mismanaged and as misgoverned as India is a sure recipe for disaster - akin to extending an open invitation to the ghost of Malthus- who, even otherwise, resurrects here, off and on, in the form of deaths and devastation in terror attacks, endemics, epidemic, wars, pestilence, diseases, floods, accidents, poverty and starvation driven suicides, murders, pre-mature deaths ( our maternal and infant mortality rate is just about the highest in the world) and many such other maladies. Already the human life seems to have become the cheapest commodity in our country.

( As early as in 18th century, the priest and philosopher Malthus enunciated a theory known as "Malthusian theory of Population." According to Malthus while the population increases by Geometric progression, the food-supply increases by Arithmetical progression which over the years, leaves the food-supply far short of the requirement of increased population, This phenomenon leads to leveling of the increased population to equate with the available food-supply through the inter-play of what he termed as " positive checks" in the form of natural calamities such as wars, pestilence, floods, droughts, epidemics, endemics, earthquakes etc. He, therefore, exhorted all the Christians and non-Christians to practice moral self-restrained to keep the population in check and termed it "Preventive Checks." He theorized that if the preventive checks are not exercised, the positive checks will automatically bring down the population by destroying the excess number. While the Industrial Revolution which brought about prosperity in the European nations in the subsequent years proved Malthus wrong in those countries and they out rightly rejected his theory branding it as predictions of the Prophet of Gloom, India incessantly suffered natural calamities in the form of drought, floods, earthquakes, epidemics etc that visited the country with alarming frequency. Poverty, hunger and starvation, the legacies of the past still persist refusing to leave the land; underlying the relevancy of Malthus so far as our country is concerned)

While the tycoons and the politicians are benefited by the growth of human capital, they whole-heartily welcome this non-depleting and ever-increasing human resource. To the former it guarantees cheap labour-force and an inflated number of gullible consumers and to the latter a swelled vote-bank comprising of certain sections of the society which specialize in multiplying their number for strengthening their political clout, promoting their community interests and political ambitions ,and power their vote-bank; as our democracy is all about number. And all that at the cost of the poor and the middle-class whose poverty and miseries get compounded with each addition of an Australia every year to our population.

The government sometimes shows-off that they are really concerned by occasionally distributing some low-key publicity material on family planning whereas the need of the hour is to formulate a firm, no-nonsense policy to enforce all sorts of conceivable deterring disincentives and penalties on the individuals and the families who do not observe small family norms preferably of “One-Child-One-Family” variety. While this is required to be done urgently and immediately, our ruling political class, in its anxiety to remain politically correct always with its vote-bank, feels shy of tackling the problem in any effective manner. Wary of offending the religious sensibilities of their minority (read Muslim) voters, the ruling class wants us to believe that a thing as simple as increased viewing of T.V. can do the trick and the Chinese are fools to resort to the harsh methods to control population. They want us to believe that better results can be achieved by a simple method- providing idiot-box to every home in the rural India!

This human liability- sadly regarded as asset- is, directly and indirectly, responsible for more than 6.0% of our total greenhouse gas emissions, for which world over we are being castigated as “the bad boy of climate change talks.” At Copenhagen they will surely force us to walk the talk and, indications are that we will not be able to do another Kamal Nath there.

Small family norms need to be enforced by meting out extremely harsh and deterring punishments, disincentives and penalties to the defaulters, just as in China. But are the ruling class politicians, who thrive and survive on the vote-bank politics and populist measures willing to do the needful in the larger national interests? While extra-ordinary maladies do require extra-ordinary measures, the politicians across the board can hardly be expected to put larger national interests on top of their own entrenched self interests that lie in fostering their vote-banks. .

Shah Rukh Khan

WORK CULTURE DIFFERES BECAUSE THE SYSTEM DIFFERS

-SANJOG MAHESHWARI

Recently the issue of frisking and detention of Shah Rukh Khan at the Newark airport in New Jersey for two hours sparked so much outrage in the country that even Information & Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni suggested tit-for-tat action and pleaded for equally stringent frisking and scrutiny of Americans visiting India.

It is unfortunate that the incidence was not viewed in a broader perspective. The episode exemplifies the 'no-nonsense' work culture in the US. Khan was detained by a US immigration officer because his name came up on a computer alert list. Although some of the other officers present at the airport tried to vouch for Khan, the officer concerned refused to budge. Unfortunately, this culture of dedication to one's duty is something that we can never imagine in India and that led us to give vent to our impotent fuss and fury; blowing an otherwise innocuous matter out of proportion to the hilt.

Not only the incidence has not gone well with our national psyche of "so-called VIP versus Mr. Nobody" -a legacy of colonial culture of the Raj days, it also highlights the huge difference between work culture of the two countries: Ours typified by “sub-chalta-hai” attitude vis-a-vis theirs rooted in “duty is supreme; nobody above the Law” ethics. Pandering to self-delusion and parading our fondness for pretentious affectations, we take delight in parroting the oft-quoted, worn out catchphrase: “howsoever high you may be; you are not above the law” ,but has anybody ever seen the long arm of law catching up with a tainted VIP? Almost always, invariably in any given situation, the big fish manages to escape scot-free.

This American culture of dedication to duty can't possibly be implanted in the Indian psyche for obvious reasons. For it to happen in India, we will have to completely delink the Executive from the Legislature. Under the extant arrangement of things the former is the handmaid of the latter. The Judiciary is also subservient to this unholy yet formidable combination. In US and many other democracies, these three institutions work separately, but in tandem, in the best interests of their people as against the entrenched vested interests of a few.

This is not the first incident in the US where an officer in the line of duty has had an 'encounter' with an influential person. Sergeant James. M. Crowley had arrested Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., a friend of US President Barack Obama, on the charge of disorderly conduct when a neighbour suspected a case of burglary at the former's residences. Instead of transferring the police officer, ,as it could have happened had the incidence occurred in India, the police unions demanded an apology from the President for saying that "the officer acted stupidly" . The very next day, at a press meet the President not only praised the Cambridge cop for being an “outstanding police officer” but also invited him to the White House along with the Professor and the American Vice-president for a beer to assuage frayed tempers and hurt egos of both the sides. He could not do anything better to redeem the badly bruised honour of his friend, who in his own rights also, is not just another man out there on the street.

Not so long ago, his predecessor in the office, George Bush looked the other way while his daughter cooled her heals behind the bars for the whole night for the charge of illegal possession of alcohol. The US is a democracy where not even the Presidents of the country, notwithstanding the fact that they hold the most powerful post in the world, cannot wield their authority to bend or twist the law of the land. This is what a true democracy is all about. In our country such things are unimaginable.

For an emotional India, venting its ire against the American security procedure could only be as meaningless as the U.S. ambassador Timothy J. Roemer's recognition of Khan as a global icon. It is our problem that we don't have that system of democratic governance and the work culture which invests us with the moral authority to return the American compliment.

-SANJOG MAHESHWARI