Controlling World Population

Social Scientists over the world have accepted the concept of welfare as the best and the only socially effective method of population control. Although no full-fledged census was carried out in 1941 due to wartime conditions, a fairly ac-curate guess estimate was made, based on preliminary data, sample surveys and other methods, which put the total population of Britain’s Indian Empire, including the Princely States, at something approaching the round figure of 400 millions, on the eve of transfer of power and partition. The much sought after overall unity could not be retained and India was left with a population of about 300 millions in round figures, with Pakistan out but the States integrated. Since 1947, in less than 50 years, however, in a country which has attempted planned economic development, applied of science to solve its material problems, and introduced — in an undogmatic way — a socialistic pattern of society to grapple with the problems of poverty and backwardness, its population has been multiplying and has now crossed, again in round figures, the 900-million mark.

That constitutes a more than three times increase in a little less than five decades; which marks a rate that is only marginally less than the highest rate registered by any sizeable population in any other part of the world, in this period which witnessed decolonisation, a breakthrough in the eradication of mass epidemics, the prevention of major famines (apart from the covert case in China), gross improvement in food production, etc., and, of course, it is well above the world average. Irrespective of all the scientific and technological advances, increase in the gross domestic product, increase in skilled manpower and the really vast infrastructural development, this enormous population explosion is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.

This is so because it not only cancels out all other economic achievements, when calculated in per capita terms, but far more dangerously because it unrelentingly goes on pushing up the proportion of the poor and the downtrodden in the population. The population increase rate is the highest at the bottom stratum of our society, consisting of the Scheduled Castes, the landless labours, the marginal peasants, the tribal’s, the city poor, and the dispossessed.

It is a universal demographic law that population increase in a community is maximum when it is subjected to all kinds of pressure, oppression, tension and, above all, insecurity. In short, when the price of life is the least, a high population increase is the community’s response to the challenge of the hostile social environment. It is the response and the revenge of an oppressed community, be it a racial minority or a specially exploited stratum. Social scientists over the world accept today that welfare is the only socially effective method of population control. There is no other method invented anywhere which can induce an  oppressed and exploited community, or the bottom stratum of society, to accept birth control, except such welfare as would perceptibly raise their quality of living and, even more importantly their dignity of life. Only when they perceive a respect for the value of life in their own experience, can they be induced to further raise its value in the lives of their children and those of the letters mothers, by limiting families.

At the crossroad from where we started in 1947, there branched out two quite different paths. The first one envisaged empowerment of the people right from the beginning, to replace the colonial administration from the bottom upwards. The principal objective, rather the driving force, being concern for the common people, the idea was the uplift the people by themselves, by their shoe strings as it were, whether in education, health, hygiene, and build a new economy round themselves through self-help. The process, repeated in half a million villages and mofussiles of India, was to receive the principal attention of the nation and all its highest institutions for guidance, coordination and support. The State and big business, of course, would have to run such heavy enterprises that would be essential for the overall national interest, but which evidently fell outside the scope and capacity of the decentralised people’s cooperative sector, as just mentioned. The total political economy would be a harmonious and balanced combination of the two sectors.

As during the struggle for independence, the local level social and political activists, a few lakhs at first, then in their millions, acting as catalytic agents but together with the entire population, gradually but definitively carving or shaping out Swaraj from the post-colonial reality was the Gandhain vision in essence worked out in considerable detail in scores of discourses.

That, however, was not the path that India chose to follow after independence. A formal and mechanical appreciation of the importance of science and technology led to a concentration and over—centralisation of all the entrepreneurial effort—of all the eggs being put in the same basket—namely, in what Jawaharlal Nehru called the temples of modern India. But there was another error which compounded the picture. In spite of the rather elitist character of the Indian national movement at the beginning, there was also a large body of middle class activists of modest means, and after the massive expansion during the Gandhain era, there had occurred a phenomenal influx of self-supporting peasants into the national struggle, which made it so unique among all the liberation movements of the world. But the importance of these social and political activities who, over the previous three decades had played the pivital role in stirring up and them mobilising the people, was now denied in the context of the post-independence reconstruction.

Jawaharlal Nehru accepted the fallacious theory that since the bureaucracy, and even the personnel at the lower levels of the ad-ministration are comparatively better educated than others, and are supposed to have got their jobs on merits, cumulatively they constituted the most modernised section of society rind hence, are potentially the most capable and effective agents for bringing about a social transformation. With this devaluation of feedback in planning and decision-making were atrophied, on the one hand, and corruption became rampant in what was soon to be popularly known as the license permit raj, on the other.

After five, decades or more of groping in the dark, we know today that there is no substitute for engaging and mobilising the entire population for full-scale social transformation, and such mobilisation has nowhere been possible without the catalytic assistance of the grassroots level organiser-cum-local leader. If the entire process is not run democratically and really with the full approval of the vast majority of the population, it will atrophy, get corrupted, and growth and development will come to a stop. There is another conclusion that should be fairly evident today.

At the beginning, we had laid stress on the building of the new temples of getting to have those powerful instruments of science and technology, things which we did not possess in our pre-modern, colonised state. But now we know much better. Getting to have them is the least part of the process. With the end of the one-sided monopoly and now also of the Cold War, such modern temples, infrastructural or industrial complexes can be purchased without much difficulty, and get set up on a turnkey basis, but get-ting your own people to adjust themselves fully to be able to run them efficiently, that is to learn the managerial as well as technological skills from the top down, is far more difficult, requiring the willing and eager cooperation of the entire work force.

We were taking a quick look back at the path we have traversed, and some of the basic conceptual choices we had made. We had begun by noting the very high rate of population increase and what it denoted. This was indeed not fatuous, for the rate of reproduction is a very sensitive and also comprehensive index of the state of socio-economic health of a country and its people. The more than three times increase in population in a little less than five decades, while displaying an apparent sang froid and unconcern on the part of the political leadership, is indeed remarkable, an” represents a mindset which, if it is indulging in an anti-Malthus bravado, is totally ignorant and uninformed of what Marx really, thought on the question, even if we do not bring in the larger ecological factors which have arisen only more recently.