Demographic Fatigue in India
D'MONTE, DARRYL
After the Billionth Baby Demographic Fatigue in India By Darryl D'Monte New Delhi Indians are notorious nitpickers, as the controversy over the birth of the country's one-billionth...
...Many succumb in childbirth, while babies are born weakened...
...Government demographers dismissively responded that the event would not occur until this May...
...States like Kerala have shown that even in the absence of economic growth, high human development automatically reduces the birthrate...
...Thus on May 11 they designated a girl born in the capital at 5 a.m., named Astha (Hindi for "faith"), as the unenviable recordholder...
...In depressed times, mass distress is prevented by offering people employment in public works—typically, building roads— and paying them with a combination of cash and food...
...It is not birthrates alone that are high...
...The number of farms has already gone from 48 million in 1960 to 105 million in 1990...
...This time the news triggered a new round of soulsearching as to why India has not been able to contain its baby boom and threatens to overtake China as the world's most populous country by mid-century...
...With too little food to go around, women deny themselves and suffer from chronic undernourishment...
...The country is topheavy with upper- and middle-class graduates who have no jobs to look forward to, while poor youngsters drop out of school...
...Just five countries—India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nigeria—account for half the world's annual population increase at present...
...If education were to spread at the base of the pyramid especially among girls, it would do more to reduce the birthrate than all of today's policies and sloganeering put together...
...To cite one pertinent case, the government's previous emphasis on having a comprehensive health service treat people at rural health centers is waning, leaving villagers at the mercy of quacks and private practitioners...
...Notwithstanding the planting of high-yield wheat and rice varieties since the mid-'60s, nutrition levels are abysmal...
...In 1960, farmland was distributed at a rate of half an acre per capita...
...All of these factors have combined to produce what is called "demographic fatigue"—the inability of the state to provide sufficient resources for a vast and growing population...
...Women and children have been hit hardest...
...Those who view unbridled population growth as a greater threat to the country's integrity than the arms buildup across the border in Pakistan point to the commission as proof that the government does not consider the issue a paramount priority...
...When the new Janata government took office, it even had to change the name of the Family Planning Ministry to "Health and Family Welfare...
...Deprivations of various kinds have kept the infant mortality rate at unacceptable levels...
...The implications for what seems doomed to be the most populous nation in the world are exceedingly grim...
...As Dr...
...But no more humane approach has replaced the mass vasectomy and tubal ligation camps that were shut down...
...United Nations agencies and organizations like WorldWatch charted the milestone for last August 15, and on the date the media expressed some consternation about the birthrate...
...The lesson has been driven home by the worldwide demand for Indian software personnel...
...A serious issue, for example, is the paucity of jobs, given that there are 10 million new entrants in the job market every year...
...India accounts for just over half the total number of malnourished children in the world—hardly something to be proud of...
...That has acted as a drag on development and kept one in every three Indians below the poverty line, compromising the muchvaunted recent economic liberalization...
...This has dropped to a quarter of an acre and is expected to fall to less than a fifth by 2050...
...Not until they can ensure the survival of their newborns will they stop bearing large numbers of them...
...It is full of noble intentions but short on specific ideas...
...In addition, the water table is falling to alarming levels and the country is again in the throes of a vicious drought...
...India's capacity to feed its people will before long come under severe strain...
...This may stem in part from the fact that today's coalition partners led the resistance to the sterilization program Prime Minister Indira Gandhi carried out during the "national emergency" she declared in the mid-' 70s...
...The only concrete step taken by Vajpayee so far has been the formation of a National Population Commission...
...In the long term, the most effective contraceptionis primary education, which has also been ignored...
...It was their popular uprising against Mrs...
...Without government direction and involvement it will be impossible to advance family planning...
...After the Billionth Baby Demographic Fatigue in India By Darryl D'Monte New Delhi Indians are notorious nitpickers, as the controversy over the birth of the country's one-billionth child has demonstrated...
...Because life expectancy is low, there is a disproportionately large young population...
...India at present actually has overflowing granaries, prompting many experts to advocate "food for work" programs...
...Due to an increase in death rates, as many as 150 million lives will be lost in these regions within the next half century...
...Experts like the American sociologist Myron Weiner have long stressed that there is no better investment India can make—in purely monetary terms—than education...
...And it raises some uncomfortable questions about violating the democratic principle of equal representation...
...The problem is not so much the unavailability of food as it is poverty...
...Sadly, India now spends only 0.7 per cent of its GNP on health, as against 2.5 per cent on defense...
...Many of them, including Vajpayee himself, were imprisoned...
...Roughly 338 million Indians are under 15 years old, which poses a special set of challenges to the government...
...Its one controversial proposal would freeze the number of representatives in the Lok Sabha, or lower House ofParliament—currently based on a combination of population and area—for states that have not reduced their birthrates...
...Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prizewinning economist, has pointed out, information is one of the best antidotes to such situations...
...Darryl D'Monte, a longtime contributor to these pages, is a journalist and editor who specializes in Asian affairs...
...India's population alone will rise by 50 per cent between now and 2050, when it will total 1.53 billion—although the average number of children per family in developing countries has dropped from six in 1950to three...
...The forced sterilization of some 7 million men and women over an 18-month period dealt a blow to the family planning movement that it has never been able to recover from...
...Indeed the harsh truth is that South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the world's two most chronically poverty-stricken areas...
...Gandhi's authoritarian measures, though, that cost her Congress Party the elections in 1977 and achieved the return to democratic rule...
...Only because it is a functioning democracy has India avoided starvation deaths on a mass scale...
...But it has not prevented small pockets of deaths due to hunger among the aboriginals, officially known as "scheduled tribes," who remain outside the mainstream development process...
...In Maharashtra State, for instance, following the devastating droughts of the '60s the local government instituted what is known as an employment guarantee scheme...
...If adopted, it would not trouble the South, but it would penalize the populous Hindi-speaking hinterland of the North, derisively known as the "cow belt...
...The scourge of AIDS is ever-present, too...
...The scheme has been lauded by the World Bank and other international institutions, but has unfortunately not been replicated in other states...
...That has to be part of a health package, so couples can be instructed in spacing and nurturing their children...
...In anticipation of Astha's arrival, the coalition headed by Prime Minster Atal Behari Vajpayee of the Hindu Right-wing Indian People's Party announced a national population policy...
...With that kind of fragmentation, the 70 per cent of the population still living in the countryside clearly cannot subsist through agriculture...
...Despite having launched the world's first and biggest government-sponsored birth control campaign in the '50s, India is now floundering as 16 million people—only slightly less than the population of Australia— are added to its ranks each year...
...A major difficulty in dealing with India's burgeoning population is the current reliance on the market...
...Yet the group's very size and makeup—over a hundred members, many of them film stars and other celebrities—has generated widespread skepticism...
Vol. 83 • July 2000 • No. 3
