Overpopulation

[sunnyd]

Shouldn't the government treat the overpopulation problem as one that needs an urgent solution?

[jayakris]

What exactly CAN the government do for the overpopulation problem, short of doing the kind of stuff that China was doing, like posting the names of women who missed their periods in public places or whatever, or doing the kind of stuff Sanjay Gandhi is accused of perpetrating during the emergeency, like forced vasectomy?

I thought the public education on population control over the years in India has not been all that unsuccessful .. That is a subjective matter though .. And I say that in comparison with the general improvement of education level By the way our birth rates have dropped quite drastically over the last 15 years or so (I should check the numbers) .. The death rate also going down is perhaps part of the issue and we cannot do anything about that either.

Anyway, again, what other things can/should government do? If you can specifiy more, we could comment...

Jay

[jayakris]

I also would like to mention my favorite line from Mahatma Gandhi -- "Every mouth comes with Two hands also" ... The Nehruvian development pattern (controlled economy, heavy industry and less labor based socialistic industrial policy) always looked at the poor population as people to be fed by everybody else, rather than people who had to be given a chance to be productive - which then would have involved agri-labor based local industries. Gandhi's charka ideas were also somewhat in these directions. But then again, despite all the lip service to Gandhi, Nehru canned most things Gandhi wanted into the cold storage quite fast. See how we imported cloth mills and brainwashed whole generations to wear teri-cotton with pride, killing our own cotton industry! Most Indians never understood Gandhi either .. Many still think Gandhi's charkha ideas were based on purity in life etc - bunkum; the man was way too sophisticated for that and the rest of it was a way to get the Indians to believe in him! I think 2 decades of proper Gandhianism and local free markets, panchayati raj etc, followed by an opening up of the economy globally in the 70s would have seen us way ahead of China easily ... Now, however, we are too far down the road and cannot go back .. Despite the unpardonable delay in development caused by Nehru, Indira, Morarjee (a Gandihan, who came to power too late for Gandhianism to work), etc, we are on a path to getting better pretty much in a capitalistic way and it cannot be reversed .. Gandhianism may now have no relevance either. Well all of that is a bit of a tangent in the matter you raised, I know...

Back to what I started with -- there are two hands with every mouth; so what is the big deal, as long as we don't have food shortage (which is not an expected catastrophe in India anymore). What exactly IS the problem with population?

If high population forces our government to take care of business in not wasting our river waters, getting the agriculture sector to be more efficienct, etc, etc, I am all for it. There are countries, albeit smaller, with higher population density than India. And some of the best places in India to live (like God's own country Kerala ) have the highest population level - and in Kerala's case with hardly any production of anything there either ... So what is the problem?

Jay

PS: I am being a bit of a devil's advocate also here, I think ... Would like to hear others' comments.

[jayakris]

Question -- how does India's population density compare to the whole of western Europe (say NED, GER, ITA, FRA, GBR) together? What kind of resources do they have in abundance than India? .. I will look for numbers, but there may be experts amongst us on these things I suppose...

Jay

[Dhruv]

Population Densities: (2000 figures)

India : 336.62
Japan: 336.72
Belgium: 336.82
Netherlands: 446.82
UK : 244.69
Germany: 234.86
Italy: 192.96
Spain:78.43
France: 108.09
USA:29.77
Canada:3.36

Anyway, yes India is on the high side esp when you consider that a bunch of the north is pretty much inhabitable (Himalayan ranges) . There are a couple of European countries (Belgium and Nederlands) that are slightly higher but that is also because they are pretty much flat. It is kind of difficult to compare country by country pop densities because topography makes a huge difference. More people can and do live in the plains that in the high mountains. In Canada for example the northern reaches are pretty much uninhabited just because it is pretty much impossible to live there unless you really really want to. But Bangladesh at 949.28 is much higher than India.

I guess one thing is that India's pop. is growing whereas theirs (W.Europe) is at a peak and is starting to shrink. A majority (IIRC 70% or so median age as of 2002: 24.1 years ) of India's pop if under the age of 30 and this is pop that will make the difference for tommorow. If it goes according to the govt. slogan "hum do hamare do" then we should be in reasonable shape i.e. this pop would be a good place to stabilize. Much higher would cause problems. The reason why the pop is a problem in India is because of the rapid rate of growth which has resulted in the infrastructure not being able to keep up with the rate of growth. But now I think if the pop stays approx. constant (i.e goes from the current reported 1.5% or so to 0.5% in the next decade or two we should be in reasonable shape. However if the current rate of growth continues that will continue to strain resources as the infrastructure will not be able to grow at the same rate. Job creation and other such things are unable to quite keep up with something that increases that fast (1% of a large base is much greater than 10% growth on a smaller base). Thus even if the unemployment rates (%) comes down and poverty (%) comes down the real numbers of unemployed and poor keeps skyrocketing and makes it tough to keep catching up and those numbers make the headlines eg 100 million unemployed (<10% but a large number)

[PKBasu]

Overpopulation is no longer seen as a serious problem for India -- and the rate of population growth (about 1.7% annually now) is much lower than it was 10 years ago (2.2%). It would help for it to decline a bit more, but demographics will be India's friend over the next 40 years.

It is worth noting that the 3 countries with the highest population densities in Asia in 1960 -- Japan, Korea and Taiwan -- turned out to have the fastest real GDP growth rates (by 1975, a new country -- Bangladesh -- had a higher population density than Korea and Taiwan). HK and Singapore (as city-states) had by far the highest population densities. The notion of overpopulation as a constraint on growth is now a bit old-fashioned (overpopulation alone is not the impediment, other policies usually are; in large countries, of course, excessively rapid population growth makes policy-implementation unwieldy).

On the relationship between economic growth and demographics, the key factor is the dependency ratio -- the ratio of the population outside the working-age group (15-65) relative to the population inside the working age group. This measure began to decline for all of Asia around 1970. East Asian countries have seen this ratio fall a lot faster in the past 35 years than India -- and most will continue to have a lower dependency ratio than India until about 2015. But for Japan, the dependency ratio begins rising after 2007, and for other fast growing East Asian economies by 2020 (Singapore from 2015, Korea around 2018) -- while India's dependency ratio will continue falling until 2030, and then grow more slowly than the rest of East Asia.

Declining dependency ratios typically result in higher savings rates, because working-people have the ability to save while children and pensioners are mainly consumers rather than savers. Higher savings enable countries to invest a larger proportion of GDP, which thereby boosts the productivity of labour -- which is ultimately the key contributor to national prosperity in the medium and long term. Unless its politics and institutional framework go completely haywire, India is perfectly poised to gain enormously from this "demographic dividend" over the next 4 decades -- and India should be the fastest-growing Asian economy over that period (which, almost certainly, will also make it the fastest-growing major economy in the world).

[BSharma]

The Issue:

“Every two seconds and tick: an Indian is born. By the end of the minute: 29 more. Within the hour: 1,768. By the day’s end: 42,434. Every month: 1,273,033. Annually: 15,531,000. Another Netherlands added to the subcontinent each year, every year. How can this be sustainable?” asks Dr Ragini Sen in her book titled We the billion: A social and psychological perspective on India’s population.

India possesses 2.4% of the total land area of the world but it has to support about 16% of the total world population. Almost 40% of Indians are younger than 15 years of age.

The question should be – Is India’s population a “problem” or a “valued human resource”?

Background:

At the beginning of the 20th century, endemic disease, periodic epidemics, high infant mortality rate, and famines kept the death rate high enough to balance out the high birth rate. Between 1911 and 1920, the birth and death rates were virtually equal - about forty-eight births and forty-eight deaths per 1,000 population. The impact of curative and preventive medicine (especially mass vaccinations) brought a steady decline in the death rate. In the early 1950s in India, women gave birth to an average of six children and India became the first country to attempt to control population growth. By the mid-1990s, the estimated birth rate had fallen to twenty-eight per 1,000, and the estimated death rate had fallen to ten per 1,000. So by the end of the 20th century the birth rate had been halved, but the massive population is still the number one problem facing India, according to a survey of people living in India.

Reasons for over-population:

There are many reasons that prompt Indians to have large families – high infant mortality rate; more hands to help in the family business; need to provide for one's old age in a country without a public welfare system; religious and cultural practices, which limit the power of women; strong resistance to population policies, particularly by religious fundamentalists.

Problem areas in India:

Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh are “problem” states because they make up 41% of the country's population, and all have a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of almost 4.0, way above the national average of 3.1. Some states have done better than others, for example Kerala (TFR 1.8) and Tamil Nadu (TFR 2.2), where fertility has dropped sharply. What is a major difference between the BiMaRU states and Kerala? Literacy rate especially in women.

The National Population Policy 2000 notes that only 44% of India's 168 million couples in the reproductive age group use effective contraception. That leaves a large proportion of the couples in the reproductive age group without access to an effective way of controlling the size of the family and for them having children is not a matter of choice but a matter of chance.

One of the reasons for China’s success in controlling the population growth was that it was better in giving its population a range of contraceptive methods from which to choose. On the other hand the program in India has sometimes been rather too focused on providing female sterilization.

The mass sterilization campaign of Sanjay Gandhi era, in which illiterate people were duped or paid to undergo sterilization procedures, has left many Indians distrustful of government’s efforts to control the population.

Is India’s population a “problem” or a “valued human resource”?

Julian Simon, an economist and demographer, wrote, "It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth." He also stated “People don't come with just a mouth, but also a mind. They are not just consumers, but also producers. This explains the apparent paradox that more we consume, more we have left to consume.” (Jay, I wonder if Simon read Gandhiji's books.)

A growing population is not an obstacle to economic development. People require conducive economic and political framework that provide the incentive for working hard and taking risks, and this is what people need to make the country prosperous. A large population is not a burden but can be an asset, if used properly. The burdensome governmental regulations, wrong governmental policies, illiteracy, corruption, religious fanatics, the caste system, etc have prevented India from taking her rightful place among the world’s economically powerful nations. For example, the problem of hunger in India is no longer scarcity of food but improper distribution.

Solution:

With development, family size will eventually fall and sooner or later the population will stabilize. However, uncontrolled rapid growth of population can overstretch the resources in the short run. The most important factor in controlling the size of the family is the literacy and empowerment of women. Where women's literacy is the highest - almost a hundred per cent in Kerala - the birthrate is the lowest; in Rajasthan, UP and Bihar - the birthrate is the highest – and you can guess what the literacy rate of women of BiMaRu states is! (By the way, I am originally from UP )

Regarding the question, "Shouldn't the government treat the overpopulation problem as one that needs an urgent solution?" Both the goverment and the society have to play their roles. The focus of the government should be on economic development and achieving universal literacy all over India. However, the society must give more power to women so that they are equal partners in marriage (elimination of male dominance) and remove the many religious, regional, caste-related, and cultural factors that have impeded India's progress.

[gvhvhg]

Im not denying that overpopulation is a serious issue, but at the same time i like our situation better than that of China. With their birth restrictions, when the time comes for India and China to take over the world, China will be a nation of elderly people!!!!

[India1989]

Basically there are disadvantages and advantages of everything.
And the way in which I see is that the population has a lot of advantage for India.

But I want the population of India to be stable at 1.5billion. After that I want no more. It is good enough.