THIS IS the second part of the article. The first part of this article touched on the prevailing view in many knowledgeable circles worldwide about how India’s enormous population will turn into an economic boon while the rest of the world grapples with a manpower crunch due to an aging population, a view which challenges the conventional wisdom about population control. This part seeks to counter that fundamentally flawed argument by reiterating the logic behind that conventional wisdom.

 

The population numbers game has two sides to the coin. One section feels growing manpower is an advantage in a booming economy while the flip side is a mammoth population will only drag the country down.

 

Human beings need resources for their existence and activities. Most of these resources are limited in quantity and cannot be replenished, no matter how much wealth we collectively generate. Let us list some of the reasons why a burgeoning population does not make economic and environmental sense:

 

1. Food: One of the essential requirements of life, food needs to be produced in sufficient quantities to feed the population. It requires cultivable land to grow on, non-polluted water for irrigation, electricity for processing and fuel for transportation. All these resources are not limitless. In spite of massive strides in agriculture in the last 40 years, we have not managed to eliminate starvation.

 

Some may argue that if we generate wealth we can easily import food. That, however, takes us back to the situation of external dependence we were in during the 1960’s and which we had to struggle so hard to get out of. And production and distribution of an increasing amount of food means not just increasing expenditure, but also a drain on the land availability for forests among other things. Deforestation for cultivation of crops is an ecological sin we could do without.

 

2. Water: Every year, some parts of our country face drought-like conditions, while some others are devastated by floods. Failure to provide potable water to large sections of population leads to a large number people falling prey to water-borne diseases which not only causes a lot of preventable deaths, but is also a drain on the exchequer due to the stress it places on the public health care system.

 

The choking of our rivers and ground water sources with sewage, chemical fertiliser and pesticide residues and industrial effluents is also creating a rising burden of water treatment besides causing extensive environmental damage. The brisk sales of bottled water may be music to the ears of the companies involved in the business, but is surely an expense the country can do without.

 

Here is a shocking statistic that should send alarm bells ringing in planning and policy circles - from 1947 to 2002, average annual per capita water availability declined by almost 70 percent to 1,822 cubic meters. [2]

 

3. Fuel: A rising economy needs fuel to power its progress. And unfortunately, our governments just do not seem to believe in investing in research on renewable sources of energy. Fossil fuel is not only in limited supply, it is produced by only a handful of countries which form cartels that can hold the entire world economy at ransom.

 

No matter how rich we become, fossil fuel prices will always rise proportionate to our demand. The more people we have, the more fuel we need.

 

And in this case, possible events like a fuel blockage due to war or such conflicts, or just the exhaustion of fossil fuel resources could lead to a complete collapse of our economy and bring civil disorder in its wake. The other aspect of oil politics is that despite the role of some Arab states in financing or sheltering the financers of terrorism globally being well-documented, the flow of funds will not stop because no one can risk taking them on as no economy can sustain an effective oil embargo.

 

4. Infrastructure: We are caught in a never-ending race to develop infrastructure that can sustain our population and its increasing demands. While this is certainly in the interests of companies working in this domain, it cannot be in the long-term economic interests of anyone, if they have to consistently keep shelling out various taxes and cesses for that.

 

5. Electricity - Even 60 years after independence, the power situation in large parts of the country is hopeless to say the least. A shortage of electricity cripples business and is definitely one of the biggest drags on economic progress, especially in smaller towns, cities and villages. A supposedly "developed" state like Maharashtra, inspite of being the national leader in terms of installed power capacity [1], faces a power shortfall of a mind-boggling 5,700 megawatts per day. That its astute politicians still manage to give away power for free to farmers, and win elections on the back of it, is another matter.

 

As a personal example, having grown up drinking sugarcane juice made by using electrical crushers, the increasing numbers of manual crushers used due to an almost assured absence of electricity in the villages and even some Tier II cities makes one wonder in which direction we are going!

 

A lot of the misery is due to distribution losses (power theft being the main culprit), which again can be attributed to dense population living in cramped areas, where it is easier to steal power and harder for authorities to track or crack down.

 

6. Transportation - Every year, thousands of crores of rupees are spent on roads, railways, airports among others Still, year after year, the traffic on the roads just keeps on growing; the crowd in the trains just keeps on increasing, and now even airports are reeling under the weight of the huge increase in the number of flyers due to increasing affluence and low-cost airlines. We talk of building more roads, highways, flyovers, railway tracks, airstrips, airports, the works. But it is always an exercise in futility, as our population keeps outstripping the supply of infrastructure.

 

As far as roads are concerned, experts blame the traffic on the increase in the number of personal vehicles attributed to increased aspirations of the middle and upper classes. What they don’t seem to realize is that ultimately it is PEOPLE who buy cars. The more the number of people, the more cars there will be, especially with a rising economy.

 

Recently Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was in Mumbai and waxed eloquent about the need to possibly ban new registrations to control the vehicular population. Well, banning new vehicles is fine, but don’t we need to look at why people use their own vehicles for daily commuting in the first place?

 

Many people use their own vehicles for commuting because during rush hour, it can become impossible to get inside trains and buses, and even if one manages to do so, "scrumming" through the whole length of the journey with the probability of not being able to (or not being allowed to) get down at one’s destination is quite significant. And at the end of it all, getting out tired from all the wrestling, clothes crumpled and soaked in sweat in the sweltering heat, one makes his/her way to a swanky office where your appearance and attire influence your career growth. That is one reason why many of the affluent just opt to travel using their own cars even if travelling by trains is much faster.

 

Unless the population of the city is controlled, adding more trains and buses to satisfy the demand is just a never-ending game of catch up.

 

The next and final part of this series on the burden of India’s population will elaborate on a few more resources of importance that are being choked due to our numbers.

 

(To be continued)