Check that booming billion now

The law under consideration will ban people with more than two children from government jobs and contesting elections. Advani8217;s remarks came, appropriately in Uttar Pradesh, the state most responsible for our population problem. It is closely followed by the three other states that constitute the Hindi belt 8212; Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh 8212; and if we continue to ignore population control we could reach a point some day soon when our southern states decide to secede on the valid grounds that while they make economic progress all that the cow belt contributes to national life is babies.

Babies so unwanted that thousands are abandoned every day in the streets of cities like Mumbai and Delhi to fend for themselves. There is this widespread belief that our street children are runaways or kidnap victims but a proper survey would almost certainly reveal that the vast majority are children abandoned by parents too poor to look after them and too illiterate to know about family planning. These abandoned children who survive on begging and petty crime represent the real face of the 360 million Indians who live below the poverty line.

At about the time Advani made his remarks last week I was in the process of finishing a book called We the Billion: a Social Psychological Perspective on India8217;s Population. It is, alas, written in the dreary style of a government report so only hacks and officials will bother to read it but I recommend it to anyone interested in gauging the scale of our population problem. Listen to this. 8216;8216;According to 1994 Survey estimates, 35 per cent of India8217;s population lives under the poverty line. With only 2.4 per cent of the land area and over 16 per cent of the world8217;s population, this growing mass of humanity, malnourished and illiterate, has been putting tremendous pressure on infrastructure, education, healthcare and nutrition. The misery is compounded further by the fact that we spend much less per capita on housing, health, education, sanitation, etc., than even such countries as Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and Tanzania8217;8217;.

Since 1993 we have been spending less and less on health and education in the name of cutting government expenditure. So in 1993, according to the book, we spent more than Rs 123 per capita on defence and policing and a mere Rs 47 on health. Compare us to other Asian countries and we look even worse. While we spend 0.6 per cent of our budget on health, China spends 2.0 per cent and even impoverished Bangladesh spends 1.6 per cent. Since healthcare is directly related to family planning it should come as no surprise that we continue to multiply our malnourished millions.

You can see them in the slums that spread relentlessly in cities like Mumbai and Kolkata but, since the Emergency and Sanjay Gandhi8217;s unfortunate efforts to enforce population control, none of our political leaders dares mention family planning. All that we have had are feeble, meaningless attempts at 8216;8216;new8217;8217; population policies, which are usually neither new nor worthy of the word policy, and yet we know exactly what needs to be done.

According to surveys that have been around since Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister we know that there are no more than ninety districts in the whole of India where the population problem is acute. So, if we had one halfway serious Minister for Family Planning he or she would concentrate energies, resources, infrastructure in these ninety districts and carpet bomb them with televised information.

All efforts, though, would be futile unless education and healthcare facilities were also improved so these ninety districts could be declared areas where Emergency measures become necessary with a special emphasis on women8217;s health and literacy. If all this were done there would be no need for laws and disincentives but the real problem is an absence of political will.

That political will makes all the difference can be seen in the Prime Minister8217;s road-building programme. Because he wanted it to happen it did and history will remember him for building more roads in five years than were built in the fifty that went before. Advani, for his part, will so far be remembered mainly for causing a lot of trouble and bloodshed in the name of Hindutva. There is time, though, for redemption. Since he has shown the courage to bring up the subject he should go that one step further and lend his name to the namby-pamby Population Council set up under the Vajpayee government and ensure, at the very least, that it comes up with a concrete policy for those ninety districts where the problem is acute. If this sounds too simplistic keep in mind that anything is better than nothing.

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