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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Too many in India by Alaka M Basu

Too many in India by Alaka M Basu

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published Published on Apr 18, 2011   modified Modified on Apr 18, 2011

Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the worsening juvenile sex ratio.

This relative inattention was also surprising because in the popular discourse, unconnected to the census, population size is invariably brought up in any discussion of India’s problems. This may be a good time to put this public concern and the census numbers together to ask the question posed in the title of this article. Are there too many of us?

Note that I am asking if there are too many of ‘us’. Not too many of ‘them’. The latter question is always, naturally, answered in the positive, whatever the category of ‘us’ and ‘them’. So the rich think there are too many of the poor around, the Hindus want Muslims to have fewer children, and mistresses of homes wish their domestic help would use more contraception. But if we think of ourselves as a collectivity of Indians, stripped of all our other identities, then, would we have been better off being fewer in number?

This simple question hides many ambiguities. We need to specify much more clearly what we mean by the superficially unmistakable words in it. Who is the ‘we’ that is better or worse off by an Indian population of 1.2 billion? Is it the world at large? Is it the India that houses this population? Or is it the individuals, families and households that make up this 1.2 billion?

We also need to define ‘better off’. Do we mean economically better off? Socially? Psychologically? Physically? Part of the confusion in discourses on population size and human welfare results from the different conceptions of welfare that underlie the arguments.

In the following paragraphs, I skim through some of these complexities in an attempt to answer my question.

First, is 1.2 billion Indians bad news for the world as a whole? In general, it is, but mainly from the self-preserving perspective of the rest of the world. One can expect in the coming months to hear much frothing on this subject by a variety of ideologies in the Western world. The more benign will focus on the global environmental costs of so many Indians in an increasingly interconnected world. More hostile commentators will also fret about the political instability generated by increasing population pressure and its potential for exporting terrorism, as well as the increased numbers of Indians that will come knocking on the doors of these poor little rich countries that are trying desperately to protect their jobs and their culture and their racial survival.

All these fears are wildly exaggerated. They are also less interesting than the implications of this 1.2 billion people for India itself. The academic literature on population and development is messy and contentious and highly politicized, but it is worth sorting through some of its threads to see if we have net reason to rejoice or mourn the census numbers.

Much of the literature on the relationship between population growth and development is about the compositional changes in population with rising or falling population growth rates. It is less about the effect of the absolute size of a population on human welfare. For example, many of the postulated constraints on development by high rates of population growth have to do with the high youth dependency ratios that these high growth rates imply, which in turn imply fewer resources for productive investment.

But to catch some of the effect of ‘pure’ numbers, let us assume that compositional changes are not an important part of differing population growth rates. So let us assume that the age structure of an India with 500 million people is identical to one with one billion people. Even better, let us assume that all our babies are born ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work right away, so that their presence does not change dependency ratios. Does it still matter whether there are 500 million Indians or one billion Indians?

The literature suggests that it does matter, but it is not clear in which direction. To take the negative effects of large numbers first, these operate mainly through the simple fact that, other things remaining unchanged, the larger the total population size, the smaller the resources available to each person. These resources may be renewable or non-renewable, collectively or individually owned: as long as their total available volume and distribution is independent of population size, more people means a smaller share per person. One can, of course, ask if having less of something is necessarily worse for one, but if we are talking of those resources that sustain and maintain a reasonable quality of life, then it is correct to conclude that larger population size increases the pressure on necessary resources.

This argument is most easily captured by the concept of population density. The larger the absolute numbers of people within a fixed piece of land, the greater the crowding. And crowding, all studies convince us, is bad for many things, including health. It increases the spread of pathogens, it adds to environmental contamination, it multiplies stress levels.

The population density of India in the 2011 census is 382 persons per square kilometre. This is higher than the 324 in the 2001 census, but it is far from out of synch with other parts of the world that are doing quite well on the health front — for shock value, consider long-living Singaporeans, whose country’s population density is 7526. Within India too, there is no visible connection between population density and health levels — states with densities well above the national average (such as, Delhi, Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh) are as diverse in their socio-economic and health circumstances as those below the national average (such as, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa and Manipur).

In other words, the context is important. Moreover, the ‘other things remaining constant’ assumption is meaningless according to those who oppose the idea of a negative relationship between population size and human welfare; in this challenge, large populations are in fact good for development.

The most famous form of this optimistic stand relates to the proverb that necessity is the mother of invention. First articulated by Ester Boserup, this argument is made by demonstrating a historical empirical relationship between population density and agricultural innovation. It proposes that the very pressures on resources that a dense population exerts spurs discovery and development of innovative strategies to mitigate these pressures. Conversely, the historically low level of agricultural innovation in sub-Saharan African countries may be related to their low population densities and resultant low need to devise methods for more productive agriculture.

Moreover, defenders of large populations also point out that environmental impacts are more affected by affluence than by population numbers, and since rapidly growing populations are usually poor populations, they are in some sense conserving the environment.

This case is sometimes bolstered by the suggestion that a larger population also means a larger number of potential geniuses to develop the new technologies to better mine or use existing resources as well as develop substitutes for non-renewable or expensive resources. One could presumably include under these technologies things like the Green Revolution, skyscrapers, plastics and dynamite. By the same logic, I suppose one should also mention the larger numbers of potential crooks (inventive or not) in a larger population, and thus explain the rise in scams, guns, murders and bombs with rising population sizes.

However, there seems not to be a convincing relationship between creative genius (or at least expressed creative genius) and population size. So we are back to the idea that the context matters. Whether our increased population size is good or bad for the country depends very much on the other circumstances of our lives and maybe there is no optimum size of population for India.

All this does not mean that population growth rates are irrelevant. Compositional effects of population growth have an important bearing on development. Moreover, even the presumed positive effects of new technology may have serious trade-offs. For example, one hears now of rises in cancer incidence in Punjab, rises that are being attributed to the pesticides and fertilizers that were central to its remarkable agricultural growth in the 1970s and 1980s. That is, there is no easy way to compute net costs and benefits.

It is at the individual or household level that the consequences of absolute numbers are probably the most significant. Smaller household size much more clearly translates into more per capita resources. More important, fewer (and later and longer spaced) pregnancies most readily translate into better health outcomes for women and children — the inverse relation between fertility and maternal mortality, maternal morbidity, infant mortality and child nutrition has been demonstrated in a host of studies and provides the most persuasive case for a negative relationship between India’s population size and its development. Healthier mothers and children are good for a country’s development. When such mothers now also have more time and resources to indulge interests and capacities that are not related to childbearing, it may or may not add to a country’s gross domestic product, but it will certainly add to its human development if one includes individual fulfilment and freedom as indicators of such development.

The author is professor, department of Development Sociology, Cornell University

The Telegraph, 18 April, 2011, http://telegraphindia.com/1110418/jsp/opinion/story_13861791.jsp

Tagged with: Human Development



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