A billion concerns
Why population debate should never be on the backburner

By Meha Mathur
I am on the wrong side of the population debate. Environmentalists don’t want to talk of population, because they say it’s the luxurious lifestyle of the rich that causes harm, not the poor. The rich have suddenly stopped talking of the population issue, because they have suddenly realised that the teeming masses constitute a huge market.

Is there any school of thought left, which realises that the six billion people have to also to be fed, provided water, given clothes, provided with products of daily hygiene, educated, provided warmth of home, entertained in malls and cinema halls, provided recreation at picnic spots, provided solace at peaceful spots. Unless we reach out to Mars, where will the infinite resources to meet these demands come from? And given the limited resources on earth, how will the unending human demand be met?

But it seems that we are in a denial phase. We just don’t want to accept the ground reality that population explosion is impacting our quality of life. Every talk that I have attended in the last few months has the same conclusion - India will enjoy the demographic dividend, only, it’s population will have to be educated to contribute and reap the benefit. Rarely do I come across speakers who talk of the immense pressure on natural resources. One of those rare speaker was Prof Around De Meyer, director, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. While urging Indians to be more innovative, he said innovation was a necessity for India, with land area being a fixed resource and the population increasing rapidly. It’s innovative solutions that will increase productivity and feed the nation. Union minister Kamal Nath’s speech a few months ago was another occasion, when I got to hear some concern about resources. He told the gathering that South and East Asia were moving towards food security, wherein one-meal-a-day families were moving to two meals a day, and two-meals-a-day families were moving towards owning a cycle or scooter. And this mobility itself raising the prices of agriculture, and energy. And Jagdish Sheth, an eminent management teacher, has now commented that the only factor that could prevent Chindia’s rise is environment.
Though he is quick to add that these two countries, through breakthroughs in science, will show the way for replicating natural resources and will help in conservation and
sustainability.

My take on the population debate is different from the generally accepted opinion. It’s not the hungry mouths that are providing manpower for the Indian corporates. It’s the educated, small size families that are providing quality market, and the quality manpower. Again, yes, a billion-population country does look an attractive destination to cold drink majors and biscuit manufacturers. But are we going to be preoccupied with the market size or quality of life? A large market, yes, but how can we forget the choking cities and villages? And how can we fail to juxtapose it against the vast, green spaces in rich, sparsely populated countries?

This brings me to the next point. If the population point has to be made, how can it be made? By staid, sarkari ads that appeared on DD? A few months ago, I read in another context, the kind of stories that sell. No more the freedom fighting stories, Ramachandra Guha had written in his book India after Gandhi. It’s Bollywood and cricket that sells. Taking on from there, why can’t the message of a small, well-educated, well-placed, and globe-trotting family, as shown in Bollywood, be sold to India?