On the 24th of April 2023, newspapers penned their straight-forward, punny headlines on India overtaking China to become the most populous country – something that was taught to be dreaded in school, where Social Sciences textbooks drilled it into our brains that population rise was a problem, while apocalyptically stating that one day, we might even cross China! We are susceptible to the indoctrination of seeing population as a liability because the teachers said so, the ‘experts’ presented it in a way made it intuitively make sense, and because all the economics textbooks we were supposed to cram (along with ever accompanying guide!) listed ‘Population’ at the top of the list of causes of every economic problem that the country faces – be it unemployment, poverty or hunger. It was said to be the result of a lack of education, inadequate access to healthcare and family planning initiatives. NCERT textbooks took up the roles of being propaganda machines for Robert Malthus and Paul Ehrlich.
Every now and then there is some armchair expert who wants to comment on the doomsday that India is heading to with the number of people it has. The most recent boorishness was from Mr. Narayana Murthy (read his words here) but put in the words on the internet and you’ll find not just him, but our dear politicians from both sides of the aisle have the same opinion – that India’s large population is an obstruction to its growth.
The panic over population hit the highs after the publication of the 1968 blockbuster ‘The Population Bomb’ by Paul Ehlrich, which saw in its introduction the apocalyptic words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the Seventies, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”
The world has definitely moved on from looking at population growth as this never-ending thing which will end up consuming the entire earth, but maybe not-so-surprisingly, if you haven’t bothered to think for yourself after years of rote-learning answers, you might end up holding dear this fear of the burgeoning population of India, which would even take up your dear jobs, opportunities and resources, leading people to think of Central Family Planning as something innocuous.
Sure, a population of 1.41 billion can make things difficult in terms of governance strategies, especially when each state of India has its population compared to countries – UP’s is roughly the same as Brazil and Kerala’s to that of Canada. But what are the possible outcomes of looking at the large number as a liability? I’m assuming the logical continuation is approaches to reduce or limit the population growth – with the hopes that killing people is still a restricted territory for those spouting these opinions, the other to-be-ignored way is something that was tried in India on more than 6 million men in 1976. The ‘softer’ way would be to incentivise people to have less children, which is taken up, although in a less coercive way. The solution to the governance problem would be smaller units of governance, as explained here by Abhijit Banerjee here, and not trying ways of reducing the good and lucky numbers.
One of the Malthusian claims is a depletion of resources, to a point that we will not have enough land to cultivate food to feed our millions. The reality of today runs quite contrary – where we overproduce wheat and rice! But food production is something that is under human control, what about natural resources? Yes, those are resources with a limit, but when the levels are falling, the human need pushes itself to innovate and find alternate sources to get the same job done, for we have one resource that has the potential to trump limitations – human intelligence and ingenuity.
Quite a free-market argument, the solution that Julian L Simon proposes, in his work ‘The Ultimate Resource’, (ref Human Capital), where he says, “There is no reason to believe that at any given moment in the future the available quantity of any natural resource or service at present prices will be much smaller than it is now, or non-existent.” Admittedly, Simon has much faith in humanity’s drive for innovation, and further elaborated upon how, when we see the prices of exhaustible resources going up, we ring the alarm bells. And although it’s a slow process, we will figure out options to move around consuming those resources. Ehlrich and Simon had a bet about the same and so far, the latter has been winning.
Not surprisingly, this is co-opted by the climate change sceptics by ignoring the fact that innovations come when you admit there is a problem and start to work on it.
Perhaps what is more disturbing than ignoring data which strictly shows reasons to not interfere with the natural rate of growth, is the tone people take (another motivation for this piece to exist) – the idea that too many people in the country is a hindrance to your own well-being. This encourages the sequitur that other people having children is bad, and of course it is the poor and uneducated that created more people, damning the economy. As with all other cases where ‘otherness’ is highlighted in the wrong, here too it has a blend of ignorance and malice, especially in our country, where it takes another dimension which most, perhaps, don’t even realise when they make the claim.
Now, one can definitely take a relative attitude and say it depends on how we ‘utilise’ the population. Would a country be healthy if the majority is a dependent population? Yes, there will be setbacks. But India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25, and 66% under 35, a gift to the economy. Which leads to the other important thing to look at when talking about population – Fertility Rates, which is rapidly falling in India’s case. It was 4.4% in 1992 and has reached 2.02% in 2023. The alarms needn’t blare for India as much as for China or South Korea or even the United States, which has an ageing population combined with low fertility rates, which implies not just a depleting labour force – we’ll see increased inequality with an ageing population which needs not only money but services, and no people to provide them.
The falling fertility rate is a concern for the future for India, but one must be cautious in how this is stated, simply because people pull up this stat to adorn their argument for why women should stay at home and nurture children, for that is their god-assigned function. A better way of dealing with this is to open up avenues for people who want to have kids to have kids – tautological, but also an irony. Society puts an incredible burden on women to have children, so much so that it often becomes counter-effective, combined with the societal structure of childcare in India which essentially chains someone to the house if they are to be a ‘good mother’. And there are cases of non-heterosexual relations where people dearly wish to be parents, but the State has deemed it illegal – both adoption and methods of IVF.
This might also seem a good point in the article to make my own opinions clear and not risk running into the purity spiral of arguing something. What is being said is NOT to incentivise increased growth rate, or even a non-interference of any kind in the ‘natural’ order of things. This whole argument is being made against the policy or governance style of looking at the Indian population, because the country right now has the best opportunity to make avenues for the use of the immense amounts of young, vibrant human capital it has, rather than looking down on it as a burden on the country’s resources. People, with their own different circumstances, will make different choices – some may even find David Benatar very compelling!
Ensuring that all avenues are open is what the Indian state should do, adapting itself to the social realities of the times.
The conclusion is a very non-radical, much-touted idea – one of Individual Freedom. If one decides to not have children, let them! And if a couple decides to have 4 or 5 children, let them too! If someone thinks they find themselves pregnant when they really are not prepared to care for the child and afford it, give them the choice of abortion! It should strictly be a matter of individual choice, for a person’s body and life are their own, and what they ought to do with it. India’s problem is not its population, but the inability of its governance system and actors to recognise its greatest asset, and mask their incompetence by resorting to passing the blame onto the people. But of course, ringing the bells of false alarm is far easier.
Edited by Yatin Satish
Design by Rosello Biju K
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