Mumbai’s going to be world’s most populous city

By then, Calcutta — now ranked seventh among the world’s largest cities — will drop to ninth position with 18.8 million people, followed in 10th place by Delhi (18.5 million), a newcomer to the dubious top ten list.

Three South Asian cities — Dhaka, Karachi, and Delhi — plus Jakarta, will replace New York and Los Angeles plus Buenos Aires and Shanghai in the top ten.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), India now holds a whopping 16.7 per cent of the world’s population on a mere 2.2 per cent of the land surface of the Earth.

“The myriad consequences of this rapid urban growth include an increase in poverty, lack of adequate housing, sanitation and health problems, unemployment and enormous pressures on virtually all basic services provided by the municipal government,” Werner Fornos, president of the Institute said at a conference.

The report emphasises that developing countries must establish programmes to dissuade rural inhabitants from migrating to cities by improving the infrastructure in villages, encouraging industries to set up in rural areas and provide job incentives to people living there. It also calls for increased assistance from more affluent countries to tackle the problem.

The latest study follows a series of similar reports over the past year, many of them spurred by India’s population crossing the one billion mark. Evidently, western agencies are taking India’s population problem more seriously than many in India.

Last year, a WorldWatch Institute report made the following chilling comments on India’s population time bomb, starting with the observation that the Indian government was suffering from `demographic fatigue.’

* Each year India is adding 18 million people, roughly another Australia. By 2050, U.N. demographers project that it will have added another 530 million people for a total of more than 1.5 billion. If India continues on the projected demographic path, it will overtake China by 2045 as the world’s most populous country.

* As the nineties unfold, the rise in grainland productivity in India is slowing as it is in many other countries. Against this backdrop, the continuing shrinkage of cropland per person now threatens India’s food security. In 1960, each Indian had an average of 0.21 hectares of grainland. By 1999, the average had dropped to 0.10 hectares per person. And by 2050, it is projected to shrink to a meager 0.07 hectares per person.

* Falling water tables are now also threatening India’s food production. The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) estimates that withdrawals ofunderground water are double the rate of aquifer recharge. As a result, water tables are falling almost everywhere, which could reduce India ‘s grain harvest by one fourth.