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. .